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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.
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.”