Sale of "free" stuff on eBay

Dave Dunfield wrote: ... If you are referring to the same thread that I recall, I think you have it wrong. The listmember helps maintain a site of manuals and other information. When he found that dynacomp was including his work without having asked permission not having given any references to where he got the information, the listmember decided to sell a DVD with a superset of all the information -- the difference being that in his auction, he clearly stated that all of the information was available on the net and he'd provide the URLs for all of it free for the asking -- he was very explicit in stating that what he was selling was the convenience of not having to download and categorize everything. As I recall it, that person got roasted pretty completely on this list for what was perceived as too high of a price, despite the fact that his DVD had more information than the 6 CD's that dynacomp is selling on ebay which collectively cost way more than the DVD. Personally, I have invested much more than 1000 hours in my sol work, maybe 2000 hours -- both the emulator and in scanning and in many cases meticulously OCR'ing and reformatting the documents so they'd be searchable and faster to download. For example, in those old proc tech newsletters they'd often list an assembly language program. OCR'ing that was tough, but I didn't stop there -- I would clean it up the best I could, then I'd assemble it and make sure that the hex produced by the assembler matched the hex that appeared in the listing. I don't have the time anymore to be that anal about it. On just about all of the documents on my site I'm violating somebody's copyright, and I'm more than willing to pull anything from my site that the original author doesn't want on there, but so far none have (and a few have been tickled to see their work kept alive). Dynacomp (Fred Ruckdeschel) irritates me, mostly because of his sneaky ebay dealings from a few years back (he had a shill bidder on his auctions and I caught him red handed). He may have been in business for a long time, but it doesn't have to mean he is ethical. A piece of me is irritated that dynacomp stands to make money on my and others efforts. A lot of his volume 6 comes from my sol site. Taken in whole, though, I can't complain about copyright issues considering that most of what I've scanned has someone else's copyright imprint on it. I went to the bother to scan and organize my web site to preserve the information. This guy is another vector of dissemination. Finally, in the things that I have OCR'd, I usually put something like "Copyright (c) 1977 Processor Techonology" or whatever in the PDF properties when I write out the PDF, but I also include "scanned and OCR'd by Jim Battle". Some of the people who in the past have complained about borrowing work uncredited are hosting some of my documents as evidenced by the PDF tag above, yet they didn't ask me about it. The bits want to be free.