Garry At 05:53 PM 6/14/2004, Pieter wrote:
At 05:29 PM 6/14/2004, John B Reinhard wrote:I thought, in layman's terms, that the copyright law says you are allowed to make a copy of media (books, magazines, music, etc) for your own personal use - NOT selling, lending, sharing, etc. So, if Bill owns the copyrights, we can buy legal originals or copies of manuals from him, make a copy to get dirty in the workshop, and keep the clean 'master' from Bill in our clean, dry, storage areas. Legally, we can't just make copies, until the copyright runs out. When does that happen? Has it been renewed? Anybody clarify this ?-snip-Actually, I THINK you must display a "copyright" notice to have a legal copyright. My copy of the GE "homeowner's service manual" does NOT have any copyright notice. It does have a tiny "T" for "trademark" after the Elec-Trak name on the cover, but no copyright inside the cover, not even a mention of GE!! I may be splitting hairs here, but I don't think Bill has a legal copyright if I am correct about the notice requirement. Other documents may have the notice. In any case, we have covered this ground before when thinking about an archives web site or scanned document availability, and the consensus has always been that we wouldn't do anything to undermine Bill's business. We all agreed we should buy a copy rather than copy it ourselves. I'll absolutely agree and abide by that.However, here's the moral dilemma. Suppose the new owner of all of Bill's stuff refuses to sell or allow the copying of ET related documents. How do we provide ourselves with the documentation necessary to keep them going? I'd suggest we think long and hard about it. It's possible that Bill just sold a "quit claim deed" to the copyrights - he sold whatever claim, however good or bad it might be, to the ET documents. He sold a claim that GE (or their successors or assigns) sold to him. To draw an analogy for the sake of clarity - I could claim I owned the Brooklyn Bridge (no really, I do) and that you could not make a legal deal to buy it from New York City without also buying my claim. Would you ignore me? Bill may have a very defensible claim to all the ET document copyrights. He may not. Since Bill has always "played ball" by making copies available at a reasonable price, we supported him. I for one will never copy if the new owner wants to sell manuals. But if the next "owner" of the GE copyrights doesn't play ball, how will you or I treat him?As a suggestion - it's a matter of economics on both sides. If you own a copyright to a publication that will sell 10 copies a year, will you spend thousands of dollars on an out-of-country lawyer (and maybe one in country too) to defend your claim? I've been there before on trademark issues, and the answer is "no." You just let it go.By the way - a Gravely newsgroup published a CD full of thousands of pages of documents relating to the (now defunct) Gravely two wheel walk behind tractor. So far nobody is doing time....._______________________________________________ Elec-trak mailing list Elec-trak cosmos phy tufts edu https://cosmos.phy.tufts.edu/mailman/listinfo/elec-trak