Toshiba Pursues Copyright Claim Against Laptop Manual Site 268
An anonymous reader writes "I'm sure most Slashdot readers have had occasion to suffer through a hardware manufacturer's terrible website in search of product documentation. It's often hidden away in submenus of submenus, and if your product is more than a couple years old, you probably have to wade through broken links. One guy has been helping to change that; he runs a site called Tim's Laptop Service Manuals, where he collects by hand materials from many different companies and hosts them together in one spot. Now Toshiba has become aware of his project, and helpfully forced him to remove all of their manuals under a copyright claim."
Re:Toshiba to Customers: Drop dead. (Score:3, Funny)
Begone vile grammar nazi! Unless you intend to enlighten us with the finer points of the art of prose, begone!
Re:Toshiba to Customers: Drop dead. (Score:3, Funny)
Of course a hungry man will eat a beast. Oh, you meant hungry man-eating beasts! Now do all of you see the importance of writing correctly?
Having read your post, I also see the importance of not being a dickhead on the internet.
Re:Toshiba to Customers: Drop dead. (Score:4, Funny)
I'm curious - could individuals host single pages, under the Fair Use doctrine? If you have enough individuals doing that, ones who don't forbid an aggregator from reframing their content (whilst hosting none itsef), ...
Sure, you'd also need to hash the entire manual and compare the hash key every time someone downloads the manual, to make sure none of those pages got corrupted/modified in the process. While you're at it, you'll probably also need some kind of tracker to aggregate the list of manuals and aggregate the list of pages everyone makes available separately.
And why limit it to single pages? You could split up each manual into a thousand different data packets, and you could make sure multiple people have a copy of the same data packets, to build some redundancy into the system, just in case some of the volunteers' servers/computers are not online 24/7.
This is a great idea, that could potentially revolutionize the web.