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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."
But I'm sure we'll now see a flood of posts from the clueless about how Toshiba "has to defend their patent or lose it".
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
And let them know why. I'm not as anti-copyright as most around here, but this is just stupid. It's not like it's costing them sales; probably saving them money at the end of the day.
My present laptop is a Toshiba. Now I know to avoid them when buying my next. There's such a big selection these days, I love it when a company makes my life easier!
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.
I understand copyright law, and that what this guy is doing is pretty clearly in violation of it, however:
1) the manuals are useless unless you have already bought Toshiba products, so people downloading the manuals are mostly likely your paying customers anyway
2) support is an important aspect of my purchasing decisions, and having easy access to technical manuals makes a big difference, especially for laptops, where getting into them to replace parts or fix things is particularly tricky
3) if people need to resort to a 3rd-party website to get the manual, then you need to fix YOUR site
4) why not get together with other laptop computer manufacturers and SUPPORT the guy in his efforts, rather than discouraging him?
My daughter got a Toshiba laptop as a graduation gift from her grandparents, and a few months into her ownership the keyboard died completely. Toshiba would not allow the device to be returned for repair/replacement under their warranty without first paying a phone "technician" $49 for a "repair consultation". The "tech" was a completely clueless English-as-a-second-language phone center guy. They offered to "refund" the $49 if their phone service did not help (hint - their phone procedures were useless with a broken keyboard). They then offered a $29 box to use to send them the laptop for repair/replacement. This company is pure garbage - they want $78 to replace a laptop keyboard that probably costs $5 or less.
Obviously if you publish or distribute some work you did not craft yourself, you should ask the owner first.
If only for politeness sake.
How would you feel if I published an old pdf from you without asking or informing you?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
more and more common. I got a motherboard from gigabyte that gave black screens during XP install. they said if I sent it in and they decided it wasn't their fault I'd have to pay hourly. a BIOS update several revs down fixed the problem. Not buying from them again...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ah yes, Toshiba and their wonderful legacy support.
The company that dropped all their support info down the memory hole without warning, when they exited the digital camera business back in 2004. All the manuals, software, firmware, and FAQs simply disappeared their site. I discovered this when I had to upgrade the firmware in one of my old cameras to address SD card compatibility issues (at the time it was already technologically obsolete in many ways, but had excellent quality optics). Only place that still had the firmware was a 3rd-party driver site with the flashing procedure instructions written in Chinese. Fortunately, the firmware itself turned out to be in English.
Toshiba eventually re-entered the camera business, but any information from their earlier generation of cameras is gone. If you want any downloads or manuals, Toshiba re-directs you to a third party telephone support service that charges $19.95 for assistance. Actually, that fee might be behind the removal of their laptop manuals as well -- whatever outsourced agency Toshiba dumped their legacy support info to, wants to be paid for that info.
Mental note: Toshiba laptops are now worth less because the manuals will be harder to come by.
I am not trying to excuse Toshiba, but if you have had to deal with the general, clueless "public" with computer support, you might have a better understanding of why they (and other companies) are doing that.
I would guess that even more than 90% of all calls to support have nothing to do with a hardware problem. They are typically:
* MS-Windows brokenness
* MS-Windows virii and malware
* Broken third-party software and drivers
* Broken third-party hardware (chargers, cables, drives)
* Users that don't understand how basic stuff works (connecting WiFi, booting, burning discs, copying files)
* Users who have hosed their machines by doing stupid stuff
That, unfortunately, means a HUGE expense to computer manufacturers, and those costs were traditionally plowed right back into the sticker price of everything they sold. In a fiercely competitive industry, companies are looking for ways to cut their prices as much as possible. Support is the first target. (And the second seems to be machine quality).
The people like the Slashdot crowd are now forced to pay the price for the changed ecosystem- we have to put up with stupid front-line "support" levels that are not support, and pay stupid fees that to try and filter out the bad apples. The assumption is that every caller to a support center is an idiot.
There are times I wish that computer professionals could carry some type of "license" that would allow them to skip the normal channels and jump directly to support people that really are support.
How is a company defending a legitimate copyright imply anything about the quality of their machines.
We are all about enforcement of the GPL to protect our rights in the free software movement, yet when a company uses EXACTLY the same laws that give us the freedom to choose alternate software everyone gets up-in-arms about the big bad business pursuing a claim against someone who has essentially stolen their copyrighted work and is using it to make money?
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Seemed like a scam to me, however. If you're going to manufacture a product, I think that warranty law requires that the expense for under-warranty repair falls to the manufacturing company.
It implies that even if they make decent machines, you don't want to buy from them because they will use their legal rights to make your life more difficult.
Thanks, but if there's a less hostile option, I'll take it.
That's odd. I also live in TX, Houston to be precise, and a three years ago purchased my mother a new 17" Toshiba. I installed GNU/Linux on it right out of the box (previously having verified that it would work with with the OS). I did have to compile the wireless driver, which was available from Toshiba's support website... While there I also noted that the fingerprint reader driver was available for my own Laptop (and it works neatly too, just swipe finger after "sudo"). While copying a lot of music files from an NTFS USB HDD (spinning disk w/ enclosure, not SSD), Linux would seize up. On Windows7 (it's dual boot you see), the file transfer would only use one core, and go slow as molasses, but Linux used multiple cores and thus the ETA was 1/4th the time to do the transfer -- Except it kept locking up mid transfer (a few gigs in). I thought maybe there was something wrong with the hardware -- bad CPU, or the chip was overheating, etc. I called for support, which cost me nothing, told them the issues, and they sent me a box to return the unit with for free. A few days after mailing the machine in a Tech called me and asked for the password to log into the Linux account. He had stress tested the chip, and since the HW wasn't at fault wanted to diagnose the real problem. Turns out the freeze-up was a kernel panic caused by a race condition flaw in the NTFS-3G filesystem module. The Laptop was mailed back, also free of charge, and to work around the issue I limited the file transfer process to a single core / single thread. (Of course I did a full wipe & re-install after getting the machine back, since the PW had been forked over).
I like that Toshiba contracts with companies to provide open source drivers for their hardware, and that they have techs that can actually diagnose problems, even ones not related directly to their hardware.
If you ask me, it's pretty fucking strange that our experiences would be so damn different. Have they changed so much in such a short time?
I'm not sure he was making money from it. From the looks of his site he doesn't even have ads*. In any event, I'm okay with copyright (I may think it's too long right now but the idea is valid IMO). In this case though, I think Toshiba would be wiser to let him do what it does. They could create a license for their manuals that allow this type of thing if they're really worried about defending copyright. And freedom to choose, means that people can choose not to buy Toshiba because of this. Since companies exist to make money, boycotting them when you disagree with a policy is one of the best ways to influence their behavior.
*He does have a donate button. I don't think that means his site rises to the level of a commercial enterprise but I wouldn't defend that position if you disagree. But I would still think it in the interest of Toshiba's customers (and Toshiba) to let him do this.
I guess this helps me with my decision on a new laptop. HP it is..
Organization? You must be joking..
Hello,
I am in the market for a laptop, which means I am reading quite a bit as part of
my research as to which laptop to eventually buy. You can imagine my surprise
when I ran across this:
http://www.tim.id.au/blog/2012/11/10/toshiba-laptop-service-manuals-and-the-sorry-state-of-copyright-law/
It seems Toshiba has decided that non-commercial distribution of product manuals, which
is a thing that would actually HELP the owners of Toshiba laptops, is not allowed:
âoeYou do not have permission [to disseminate Toshiba copyright material] nor will it be granted
to you in the foreseeable future.â
I most definitely won't be buying a Toshiba laptop, nor will I ever purchase any other
Toshiba products. Your policies are anti-consumer and hurt those foolish enough to spend
their money with your company.
Further more, numerous examples of other of Toshiba's anti-consumer policies, are found
in public comments to an article linked here:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/11/10/1334221/toshiba-pursues-copyright-claim-against-laptop-manual-site
Thank you so much for publically stating Toshiba policy. It leaves me with quite clear
reasons as to why I will never purchase Toshiba products.
First off, copying is not theft. You're making an appeal to authority without considering what that authority says. As the FSF points out, "Unauthorized copying is forbidden by copyright law in many circumstances (not all!), but being forbidden doesn't make it wrong. In general, laws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don't fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change.".
Second, the key to understanding how GPL copyright infringement lawsuits are so different from proprietor's copyright infringement lawsuits or threats of copyright infringement lawsuits is to examine the effect on the user. The GPL says you're free to do things regulated by copyright law including copying so long as you don't deny recipients the same freedoms to do the same. Proprietors, on the other hand, deny recipients those freedoms; Toshiba is flatly disallowing anyone who's not an authorized dealer from sharing copies of their manuals. Again, just because a law says copying is forbidden by default doesn't make copying wrong. Thus despite using the same underlying copyright system, the outcome for the user is radically different and the public's support for that underlying system should reflect what we need that system to say. The conditions the GPL grants licensees are far more amenable to the public than the antisocial deal proprietors offer.
Digital Citizen
Because makers are putting "features" in their hardware that can't be "unlocked" without their crapware. The computer runs "better" with the crapware. That's the case with my Lenovo. A fresh restore install (with crapware) boots from power-on to usable desktop in under 30 seconds. A clean Windows install takes about 45 seconds. Crapware speeds up windows boot. At least for Lenovos with "enhanced experience" (my version of EE is 3, no idea how 1/2 do).
Learn to love Alaska
Copyright laws protect creative and artistic works. To me the collection of facts on how a printer operates is no more creative than the collection of phone numbers in a phone book.
We are all about enforcement of the GPL to protect our rights in the free software movement, yet when a company uses EXACTLY the same laws that give us the freedom to choose alternate software everyone gets up-in-arms about the big bad business pursuing a claim against someone who has essentially stolen their copyrighted work and is using it to make money?
I don't think anybody says Toshiba doesn't have the right to do this, but their action doesn't help Toshiba nor their customers in any way and therefore is stupid.
Here you go: whenever you walk into a store, that store can throw you out for trespassing. It's well within their legal rights to kick you out for trespassing.
No, they may not. They invited you in, and so you are not trespassing. They can kick you out for another reason, then trespass if you don't leave after being "asked" to do so. But they may not simply kick you out for trespassing. They invited you in.
Learn to love Alaska
Clearly, Toshiba does not want anybody to fix their own products any more.
There. Fixed that for you.
I can't remember the last time the lack of a repair manual has kept me from operating a device.
In the radios in the 50s (which i picked from the trash) schematics including simple test procedures were stuck in a small paper envelope taped to the inside of the enclosure.
In the electronic device of the 80s at least a schematic was included in the manual, often including simple test instrucitons.
At some point the belief started that only licensed service centers or at least some who pay fro the instructions should have the information to touch the holy devices.
MESSAGE TO THE COMPANIES: I am the customer who buys you fucking device. Every money you charge for helping to fix/repair the device i gave you money for will make me less happy.
Its sad to know that a broken stabilizer capacitor probably causes more cost (and effort) to repair dur to the small and intransparent market than to just buy a new device.