Yikes! Copyright and trademark, etc., is important – I have done internal presentations here to make sure that we are all careful about that. While it is rare for any manual information to be the basis of serious copyright legal cases, the consequences of such infringement could be harsh and fiscally troublesome.
The Legal Counsel inside a company (of any size) should be involved in any situation where these can arise. If your former friend had ever mentioned his approach to them, I am sure he would have been given way more than a sharp rap on his knuckles by competent legal counsel! And, of course, if you are finding your verbiage and images are being used by competitors, the legal folks can (and should) send a cease-and-desist to start. Often, this is enough to solve the problem (i.e., “don’t file a lawsuit that costs money if you can cure it easily” mode of operation) – it is rare to see the Apple-Samsung type of cases, actually. Z From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ken Poshedly Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2015 1:17 PM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected]; Johnson, Joyce Subject: Re: secured PDFs It's more a matter of our verbage and/or images being copied and used in the documentation by competitors. As a tech writer for two world-known heavy equipment companies over the past 17 years, I know first-hand that it is not uncommon for former technicians and trainers to be put in front of a keyboard and terminal to produce manuals when they get "too old" to travel long distances or for extended periods for training or service duties. Their skills are valued far more than their ability to write coherent text. They obviously know every thread-pitch, ampere and torque of all bolts and everything else, but proper writing skills and observance of copyright laws are TOTALLY foreign to many of them. That is exactly what happened when I worked alongside a former friend who had been a trainer for many years but then got into technical writing. Cutting and pasting stuff verbatim from competitors' manuals was totally what he did. When I told him our company could theoretically get sued out of existence, he brushed it off. In the real world, I don't know if that kind of stuff (being sued for using plagiarized text and graphics in construction equipment manuals) actually matters, but my job -- the way I see it -- includes protecting my employer from this kind of stuff. On Tuesday, March 3, 2015 4:00 PM, "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Ken...just wondering... If a customer buys your product, what do you care if they make changes? John X Posada AML Syst & Ops Supt Data Analyst | US FCC & RC Systems Control & Analytics | HSBC North America Holdings Inc 330 Madison Ave., NY NY _______________________________________________________________ Phone Int: 212-525-5483 Ext: Personal Cellphone - 732-259-2874 Fax Conference Bridge - 877-304-0052, Code 74809254 Email [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> _______________________________________________________________ Protect our environment - please only print this if you have to! From: Ken Poshedly <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, "Johnson, Joyce" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Cc: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: 03/03/2015 03:56 PM Subject: Re: secured PDFs Sent by: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> In addition to hard-copies of our manuals included in the operator cab of the heavy construction equipment my company manufactures and markets worldwide, we also make available pdf files of our manuals with passwords to prevent changes, copying text & images, etc. So far, we're not aware of any plagiarism or other unauthorized use of our stuff. At least not yet. -- Ken in Atlanta On Tuesday, March 3, 2015 3:33 PM, "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: We used to deliver user guides as secured PDFs; however, the security settings in Acrobat 9 never fully suited our needs. We have since upgraded to Acrobat 12, but I haven't checked if the settings are any better. That said, securing the documents ended up being more pain than it was worth. Too many users wanted to extract pages or do other things that we deemed were OK. We dropped the securing documents years ago. I know there is fear that someone could steal some trade secret (I never found one in our manuals), but as long as you are distributing a document in either PDF or print, you have to assume that sooner or later your competition will manage to get a copy. As far as protecting ourselves from someone modifying our documentation in a way that could expose us to liability for machine damage or personal injury, we cover ourselves (per the lawyers) by including disclaimers in the preface and noting that the documentation always remains our proprietary property and cannot be altered or duplicated without our permission. I'm sure that doesn't stop anyone, but the legal folks say that if a customer violates that clause, they place themselves at risk through no fault of ours. Tom Beiswenger Manager, Technical & Training Documentation, Project Manager - Inspection Business Emhart Glass Mfg. Inc. 1140 Sullivan St. Elmira, NY 14901 PH: +607 735-4279 FX: +607 734-8278 Mobile: +607 769-4779 Email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> From: "Johnson, Joyce" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: 03/03/2015 03:14 PM Subject: secured PDFs Sent by: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> We deliver user guides (software and hardware) to customers via password-protected pdfs, loaded onto servers and also posted on our customer web portal. I’m wondering how members of this group deliver customer-facing documents. Do you use pdfs? If so, do you secure those pdfs? If you secure them, how do you accommodate in-house colleagues who request unsecured pdfs so they can extract pages and images? Thanks in advance for your responses. Joyce Joyce M. 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