90% of the content of Heathkit manuals is assembly instructions. Once a kit has been built, all the owner needs is schematic, operating instructions, theory of operation and troubleshooting data. In every Heath manual I ever saw, this information was contained entirely in just a few pages.
The bottom-feeder is unlikely to have the deep pockets of a large corporation for going after copyright violators, especially ones originating in a foreign country. He would have to put up his own legal expenses, and the alleged violator would unlikely have enough assets to make legal action worthwhile in an international court case. Even if the copyright holder won, I doubt that he would be able to even recover his attorney fees from the lawsuit, let alone come out ahead by selling photocopies of old Heathkit manuals to hams. Even if he were successful in his effort to enforce his alleged copyright, someone with a little determination to provide a service to the ham community could by-pass the legalities and publish his own version of the manuals by paraphrasing the operating instructions, circuit theory and troubleshooting data into his own words, and redrawing the schematics rather than photocopying them. A re-drawn schematic would not be provable as a copyright violation, since one could have reproduced the schematic from scratch by tracing the wiring in an actual rig, and there would be no way to prove otherwise. Don k4kyv _______________________________________________________________ This message was typed using the DVORAK keyboard layout. http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/ http://gigliwood.com/abcd/ ______________________________________________________________ Our Main Website: http://www.amfone.net AMRadio mailing list Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ List Rules (must read!): http://w5ami.net/amradiofaq.html List Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/amradio Post: [email protected] To unsubscribe, send an email to [email protected] with the word unsubscribe in the message body. This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
