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This page specifically addresses the issue of copyright for the manuals and other documents hosted in the Manuals pages on this site. For the more general issue of copyright for the KO4BB.com web site, see the Copyright, Linking and Legal Matters page.
Material in the Manuals folder is copyright of their respective owners.
The issue of copyright is serious, but I believe both HP and Tektronix have no problem with the practice of scanning and hosting their manuals of obsolete equipment on publicly accessible web sites they do not control. Even HP/Agilent downloaded some manuals from my web site when they built their own Obsolete Equipment Manuals pages, so I don't feel bad. On the other hand, copyright law serves an important purpose. If a copyright holder were to complain about material on my web site, it would be gone from my site so fast, your head would spin.
If you do not feel comfortable downloading this material, then don't.
If you are the copyright owner of material on this site, and you object to the material being on this site, please advise me and I will remove it immediately.
I accept no responsibility or liability for problems resulting from your visit to this web site or from your use of material from this web site.
We need quality outfits such as Artek Media, Qservice and a few others. They provide valuable service by having access to paper manuals very few people have and the quality of their scans is generally much better than what I and other amateurs in the business can do, and their prices are also reasonable, I wonder why I would spend an hour looking for a free manual if I can get it from one of those outfits for $15, but that's just my opinion. They routinely or optionally provide both fully indexed text searchable and high resolution copies ready to print. So I want to keep them in business and I have bought and will in the future buy more manuals from them.
The manuals I provide on my web site are generally of lesser quality (save the few exceptions like those made by John Miles and a few others). However, even the better scans on my web site rarely have both full text searchable AND high resolution ready to print versions. In spite of the generally lower quality, I believe that by hosting these manuals, I also provide a valuable service for those who would not in any event buy a commercial pdf from one of the outfits listed above. I started this web site because I was using these manuals myself. In many cases, they are sufficient.
I certainly will not knowingly host a manual scanned by Artek or Qservice on my web site, unless they have allowed me to do so. These outfits have a discrete watermark or other marking indicating they scanned the document. However, these are barely noticeable and absolutely do not interfere with using the document. I do not mind those, they are a small price to pay for the quality of the work.
On the other hand, I have seen some free manual sites download free manuals from other web sites, or take manuals that were uploaded to their web sites by generous contributors and put their own watermark on the pdf document, as if they had scanned it. You won't get that from me.
I believe that covers it. Comments welcome.
Didier KO4BB