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Toshiba Pursues Copyright Claim Against Laptop Manual Site
An anonymous reader writes "I'm sure most Slashdot readers have had occasion to suffer through a hardware manufacturer's terrible website in search of product documentation. It's often hidden away in submenus of submenus, and if your product is more than a couple years old, you probably have to wade through broken links. One guy has been helping to change that; he runs a site called Tim's Laptop Service Manuals, where he collects by hand materials from many different companies and hosts them together in one spot. Now Toshiba has become aware of his project, and helpfully forced him to remove all of their manuals under a copyright claim."
They used to. It started to get a bit less reliable somewhere around the 3000 series. At this point they're yet another PC manufacturer short on ideas with a legal department that considers customer hostility a good thing. It seems a common problem when a company grows enough to hire administrative people who aren't involved with the products.
Copyright and patents are two vastly different beasts.
Because Toshiba sells repairs. Or at least sells nice "Toshiba-authorised" stickers to repair-shop which in exchange expect advantages over non authorised shops. It's actually written in the middle of TFA citing Toshiba lawyers:
“The manuals are only available to Toshiba authorised service providers under strict confidentiality agreements.” “It is not our company policy to grant authorisation for the use or reproduction of Toshiba manuals to anyone who is not an authorised Toshiba service provider.”
1- It is not clueless to say they have to defend their patent or lose it. That's how it works. You lose patent and trademark protection if you don't try to defend any infringement you know about.
Try again. Trademark works that way since trademark is basically perpetual. Patent protection doesn't work that way, though it should, since it'd take care of a lot of submarine patents and patent trolls who wait until a product is big to sue. So yeah, still clueless.
2- This isn't about patent, it is about copyright. They are different.
On this we agree. But again, at the same time, copyright still doesn't get affected by attempts of enforcement. Only trademark does.
3- You can hate the current copyright laws, but that doesn't mean someone who acknowledges them is clueless.
The irony in that statement is hilarious given the above.
4- Don't buy products from manufacturers who play this game. Do your research before purchasing.
Noble gesture. Not sure it'll make even a dent in their bottom line, but noble nonetheless and something I try to do myself.