J2
Junior Member
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To discover, you must lose sight of the shore
Posts: 55
Raleigh, North Carolina
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That's a fairly accurate description of the copyright law, and it is probably true that the Internet site that publishes some work still under copyright has technically violated that law. The Internet, however, has changed things. I doubt that any publishing house, outside of Disney, which has tried to prosecute a church, the Boy Scouts, and Boys and Girls club under this law (for using things like mouse ears to entertain children), is going to bother going after an Internet site for publishing a decades-old manual. Having spent over 30 years covering court cases as a journalist, I suspect that a busy judge (at least the ones I know) would calendar that case for sometime in 2025. That's the technical reality. As to the moral compass, I am not a bit concerned about using readily available material that a publisher has been making money on for decades. Of course, everyone has a right to make his/her own moral judgements, and I do respect yours. If a new bike were being introduced, and a team of writers and a publishing house invested their time and money to produce a sorely needed manual on that new product, I would pay them for that effort.
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