Statement
of Copyright Issues
Most of the service manuals and owner’s manuals that I offer no longer have a valid Copyright or were never under Copyright. I also have agreements with several of the manufacturers to provide these. All of the manuals I sell meet the conditions of the exclusions under U.S. copyright laws. These exclusions and other laws allow the reproduction, distribution and sale of protected materials under some or all of the following conditions:
1) You are not competing with or infringing upon the copyright owner’s economic gain from sale of the item (i.e. the copyright owner makes them available as a public service at little or no charge).
2) The copyright owner has specifically elected not to enforce its rights by certain actions, placing the material in the public domain.
3) If the "legal entity" which originally owned the material ceases to exist then the new "legal entity" (if there is one) must apply for an "assignment of rights" for the material. If a corporation merely changes it's name through restructuring or sale then it must apply for the rights.
Note: A user or service manual for a camera or photographic accessory does not meet any of the conditions under copyright law to be an “intellectual property”. Court cases have determined that published written works must convey "unique" information in order to have a valid copyright. For example... If I write "The sky is blue" I would not be able to copyright it because it is a commonly understood concept. These precedents have been applied to many "instruction manuals" because the information contained in them is common knowledge to a broad group of people.