Heath Co./Heath manuals

[Ray Mack]

Paul Dean wrote:
Hi, gang!

Since Heath has copyrighted their manuals, it is **technically** illegal to
copy them.  However, and I know this will honk off a couple of folks on
this list, in order to preserve a copyright, one MUST take positive action
to enforce it.  In my opinion, Heath has not done so.  A small
advertisement in a single, limited circulation magazine really doesn't
constitute a positive enforcement action.  Now, if they were to sue W7FG
and HI Manuals, I'd call that a positive enforcement action.

As far as I can tell, they, among others, are openly violating Heath's
copyright without repercussion.  I've never seen a "reprinted with
permission" notice on any of their products.  If I'm wrong on that, I will
stand corrected, but normally, a copyright holder giving permission to copy
requires such a statement.  I've reused ARRL materials with permission
before and they are very specific as to the language that must be used!

Anyway, just my 2 cents...........
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Here is some additional 2 cents worth.  I believe that Copyright is the subject
of USC 21.

The first part of USC 21 describes what materials are subject to copyright. The
only material that even comes close is literary works.  I would submit that a
manual is *not* a literary work.  To be more precise the manuals are a required
component part of the equipment which further disqualifies them from copyright
protection.

My legal, but non-lawyer, opinion is that they never had a valid copyright on
any of their manuals.  You can say something is copyrighted, but that doesn't
make it so.  My favorite abuse is Intel's assertion that they owned a copyright
to the instruction mnemonics for the 8080 assembly language!

If I happen to be wrong on that point (and I doubt I am), then it is unlikely
that they renewed the copyrights on manuals from before 1968 for products that
were out of production.  All of those would now be in the public domain.

The only recourse they *might* have is the copying of their trademark logo as
part of the manual.  But if you make it clear that the copy is a copy of an
original Heath document and is *not* a product of the Heath company, they will
likely lose if they go to court.  Unfortunately, many companies feel quite free
to sue for trademark infringement on the theory that "I can afford more justice
than you."

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