"Winfield Hill" -edu wrote in
message ...
Chris wrote...

I still think a lot of this discussion comes down to whether
electronics designers (who, after all, are being paid to create
intellectual property) are just trying to skate around the necessity of
paying for somebody else's intellectual property, which has admitted
value. Otherwise, why would we be having this discussion at all?

I disagree, we're not talking about manuals that can still be
purchased from HP / Agilent. (And by this I mean real manuals,
not microfiche dups that can't be used at the workbench.) We're
talking about the real shortage of manuals for old instruments,
where more manuals than instruments have been thrown away or lost.

Right. That's how I understood it. The issue is NOT how to get things free
(or cheap) that are for sale by their rightful copyright owner. The issue
is how to deal with things that the actual owner no longer bothers to sell.

And in that kind of situation, copyright law is quite lenient when copies
are made for "private study or research" rather than resale. It is
perfectly legal for you to copy, for your own use, any HP manual you can get
your hands on. Paying other people to do the copying is a gray area.

But the underlying principle is that if HP wanted to make money off these
things, HP would offer them for sale, and HP doesn't, so HP isn't losing
anything.