Jay West wrote: For an analogy, isn't it like someone getting hardware, software or documentation from a dumpster or yard sale etc. and not giving credit as to where it came from? How many ebay ads for vintage hardware does that apply to? Lots, I suspect. If the guy passed the scans off as his own data *then* I'd be pissed in Al's shoes, but it sounds like he made no such claim. The lack of credit's mildly annoying, but the people I'd be really upset at would be the ones who claim that *they* scanned the data in.

I think it would be a wise idea. It certainly seems to happen enough. -- --------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous. ----------------------------------

I've also seen a similar racket with "map prints" -- you buy what you think is a map, and get a badly reproduced inkjet copy. -- --------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- There's a sucker born every minute. -- P. T. Barnum ------------------------

----- Original Message ----- From: "Lyle Bickley" <lbickley at bickleywest.com> To: "Al Kossow" <aek at bitsavers.org> Cc: <classiccmp at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 12:04 AM Subject: Re: what BS honest I have a few manuals for old video capture cards and other gear that is very hard to find I wanted to make PDFs of. I want the PDFs incase my manuals get lost, or if a fellow collector needs a copy (since they cannot be purchased easily or at all).The issue I have is why watermark (to prevent theft) something that you do not even own the copyright to release in the first place?

----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 12:44 AM Subject: Re: what BS I am just saying he (and others) do the work so the material does not disappear, how important is where it originated from? If you start watermarking each page you might obliterate something useful by accident. Even if it is watermarked people will still try to sell it anyway. I also worry about the copyright holder using the watermark to go back to the person who scanned it to cause problems (can happen).

On 1 Mar 2007 at 1:06, Teo Zenios wrote: I'm assuming that Al is using a recent court opinion concerning DMCA and historic preservation of material related to firms and computers that no longer exist or are no longer manufactured. But selling the same information seems to cross the line and is no longer related to preservation, but rather to commerce. Or so it seems. But if Al is violating some law by putting this stuff up on bitsavers, then I agree that he should remove it before someone sues him. It's really a shame to watch the web evolve and see material disappear. Even archive.org doesn't keep everything around. Cheers, Chuck

Chuck Guzis wrote: Before they vanished, DEC had many old manuals on the price file. If you ordered some of them then you might get back a note to say that they could no longer provide it, but if the manual was available then you'd get it (albeit probably a photocopy). So if HP and IBM etc. offer the same service, then Al wouldn't be covered (even if he is a museum or library). No, he should wait until he gets a take-down notice (or perhaps actively seek permission). BAMA got hit recently by HP demanding that all the HP & Agilent manuals be removed, didn't they? All go sorted amicably out in the end I assume as it now says: "The manuals listed below are Reproduced with Permission, Courtesy of Agilent Technologies, Inc." archive.org don't say that they'll retroactively delete stuff on request, just that they'll stop making it available to you and me. I _presume_ it's all still there somewhere and may well be available in the future. OTOH if you set up a robots.txt to keep them out, then they'll stay out and your stuff won't get indexed. Nothing to stop you writing a crawler that ignores robots.txt (assuming you have enough bandwidth and diskspace to keep up with the web). Antonio -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.441 / Virus Database: 268.18.4/705 - Release Date: 27/02/2007 15:24

Lyle Bickley wrote: I need to read the ebay ad to see if Al's summary matches the text; I'm not sure that getting something for free that was available for free and then including it as part of a sale is "thievery". A little dishonest yes, but where's the theft? I doubt it'd help. However I'd give serious consideration to every PDF file having a cover page giving the source (bitsavers), the scan date, and contact info for the original scanner - similar to what the various free electronics datasheet sites seem to do. It provides an incentive for people not to pass things off as their own work whilst not "harming" the actual main content of the file, and likely only adds a couple of KB onto a multi-MB file. Exactly.