[AMRadio] Heathkit Manual Copyright Challenged

[Donald Chester]

> From: CL in NC <mjcal77 at yahoo.com>

> ... I tried to get a manual from the fellow that started all the 
> copyright mess when he supposedly bought the copyrights a few years 
> ago, he told me he had thousands of manuals in his storage building 
> and he would look for what I needed the next time he went there. 
> Never heard back.  Eventually got the manual via another source...

> Charlie, W4MEC in NC

The guy is a classic example of the bottom feeder, hoarding the manuals 
and sitting on them, hoping to make an easy buck off something he never 
created to begin with.  I have never seen any publicity or advertisement 
from his company offering the manuals for sale or download, so it 
doesn't look like he is going out of his way to market his "product". 
He has basically just taken the manuals out of circulation (he thought), 
depriving Heathkit owners of a replacement manual, offering no useful 
service in return.

As far as copyright vs intellectual property vs reproduction rights, 
those distinctions are nothing beyond semantics. Maybe the "intellectual 
property" still belongs to the creators of the manuals at the 
now-defunct Heath company, but the right to one copy of the manual was 
inherently licensed out to every purchaser of a Heathkit and to 
subsequent owners, since an integral part of the purchase included a 
manual along with the electronic components.

Maybe I need permission to run off copies of my original manual and 
offer them to the public, or to post freely downloadable copies on the 
net, but any owner of a piece of Heathkit equipment damn sure is 
entitled to borrow the manual and photocopy it for his own use or 
download a personal copy e-mailed to him, since he is replacing nothing 
more than the physical paper and ink that served as a vehicle to impart 
the INFORMATION that Heathkit licensed to the current owner of every 
piece of equipment they sold. Of what use is an out-of-date equipment 
manual other than to replace the damaged or lost copy that originally 
accompanied equipment someone now owns?

By the same token, the purchase of this computer included a copy of the 
OS, duly licensed for my use.  If I lose the original CD and the hard 
drive crashes, I am free to copy of the same software from any source I 
can find and re-install it to the new  hard drive, since I still own the 
computer with the original product code.  The OS may have initially cost 
a few hundred dollars, but Micro$oft will sell me the replacement CD for 
about $15. Or I  can borrow a friend's CD, load the OS on my machine, 
activate it using the product code that came with my computer, and it is 
now legitimate for my use.

How is "intellectual property" printed on paper any different from 
digital software recorded on a disc, as far as rights to usage are 
concerned?