The original GE "homeowner's service manual" in my possession has no copyright notice, library of Congress number, no publisher, nothing. I have been told that none of that is legally required to establish ownership or first publication, and that even without any notice you could be infringing on a copyright.
That being said, if in fact someone far away has the rights and is not interested is publishing or distributing manuals, here's a couple of plans:
(1) contact Bill Gunn. Find out who owns the manual copyright. Contact that person. Get a release. Scan it and put it up on the net as a .PDF file or have someone print it and figure out how to pay for distribution.
(2) Just do it. Scan a copy and make it into a .PDF file - distribute for free over web. Assume that nobody is going to incur court costs for the minimal audience for this publication. It's not Harry Potter 6!!
I belong to a Gravely tractor group, and every manual ever published by Gravely is easily available for free on the web. Gravely was bought by Ariens (still in business), but the line has been recently discontinued.
It's interesting that we aren't timid about putting GE's advertising literature up on the net, but not their manuals.
I won't make a recommendation here. I have, however, seen this exact same thread repeated about once a year for the last x years! Just trying to "cut to the chase."
At 02:24 PM 7/18/2005, you wrote:
So has anyone figured out who owns the rights to the manual? I bought one from Bill a number of years ago and it does not have any fold outs or anything like that. Which is a pain as I have to piece the pages together for the schematics.If the "ownership" is some guy in Central America who took all the good stuff I'd like to know :-)Chris _______________________________________________ Elec-trak mailing list Elec-trak cosmos phy tufts edu https://cosmos.phy.tufts.edu/mailman/listinfo/elec-trak