In article . com,
;-p wrote:

| Oh come off it Colin. We all know that none of us has the real rights
| to this material. What I'm saying is that if "I" go to the trouble to
| scan in a 200 page manual and then upload for free use by others, I
| have done most of the work

Actually, the authors of the manual have done most of the work, NOT
YOU. Don't get me wrong ... I find resources like yours to be
extremely useful, and I'm glad you do it. And let me say `thanks for
doing it', because while I don't think I've used any manuals from your
site yet, I've used manuals from other similar sites, and I'm glad
they were there, and may use your site at some point in the future ...

But to claim that somebody else is stealing your work is a bit odd,
because unless the manual is really old, you are legally stealing it
from the authors.

In the US, if a manual was written after 1964, the odds are that it's
still covered by copyright (the only way it wouldn't be is if it was
explicitly entered into the public domain.). If it's written from
1923 to 63, it'll still be covered if the copyright was renewed. Few
are, but it's possible.

Granted, the manufacturer may be out of business. Or they may not
sell the manual anymore (as is very often the case.) And they may not
mind if you scan it and put it online -- it helps out their customers,
after all. But even if the manufacturer is out of business and you
can't even find who owns a given copyright, that doesn't mean that
nobody owns it, and it doesn't mean that you can legally scan it and
give it away as your own. Odds are that nobody will mind, but it may
bite you at some time in the future.

| and if someone downloads this work and sells it they are stealing my
| work. In that regard the seller is a thief. Maybe not in the legal
| sense but in a moral sense he is. THIEF he is and THIEF I'll call
| him.

He's no more a thief than you are, if the manual is still covered by
copyright. In that case, both him and you are `stealing' from the
owner of the copyright. Odds are that the owner doesn't mind, but
unless you have written permission, it may bite you at some point in
the future.

As was suggested, if you want to claim copyright on your scans, either
do more than just scan them -- clean them up, add searchable indexes,
OCR them and correct the results, etc., or do what I suggested -- add
a little poem at the end about ham radio or something. Either one
could give you some claim of copyright on the final result and could
give you legal recourse against whomever is violating _that_
copyright. (Of course, I'm no lawyer. You may want to talk to a
lawyer about it ...)

Or you can just scream until you're blue in the face about the THIEVES
STEALING YOUR WORK! It won't change anything, but maybe it'll make
you feel better.

--
Doug McLaren,
It's not easy being green. It takes way more food coloring than you'd think.