IP fun....

[JohnRoberts]

I just ran out of owners manuals for my drum tuner (just made it through Christmas but was hoping to make it until next year before printing more) so I needed to get another batch printed up, but the print service refused to print them until I proved it was my copyright???

I routinely put copyright notices on such things but was never asked to prove it was mine.

I told them the fact that I was having the print order shipped to the street address of my company was a clue that I was submitting a valid print order.

I guess I shouldn't complain about somebody protecting my IP.

I suspect somebody must have sued them for indiscriminate printing of copyrighted materials?

Kind of interesting and a first for me...

JR

 

[s2udio]

Sign of the times !
Seems they want the arse end of the donkey for proof of  "ownership IP"  nowadays.
Honesty and belief , against  the "technoconfused greed of society" ........arghhh
And then...... the feckin Lawyers... 

 

[PRR]

> I proved it was my copyright

?? You can't *prove* a copyright, even in court.

Copyright exists in the creation. No registration needed. Formal registration only shows that you claim copyright, not that your claim is valid. You can sell a copyright, and that sale could be secret.

You can claim and enforce a copyright which is invalid. The story of Happy Birthday has more holes than a '33 Chevy found in a field, but they are -still- demanding and getting royalties.

I would *think* what they want is a signature saying you will defend the printer from any copyright claim. They ought to have a stock form for that. I signed one long ago for a CD pressing. In your case, for your product, it seems fairly safe to sign such a thing; though with all the patent suits going around, maybe totally-bogus copyright suits will be next.

Maybe shop around for a less snotty printer.

 

[JohnRoberts]

> I proved it was my copyright


Maybe shop around for a less snotty printer.

I came pretty close to that, but i had already uploaded my file and didn't want to waste more time on this.

They were satisfied by my email explaining that I wrote the owners manual I was printing.

=====

OK I think I figured out where the conflict arose.  Text book and educational course material publishers were seeing competition from copy printers (like FEDEX) getting a little too aggressive while not respecting copyrights.  Libraries are generally allowed a fair use exemption, but the text book "business" is a cash cow that gets defended.

I'm not sure how they'll stop copying when all you have to do is bump two smart phones together.

JR

 

[PRR]

Your bumph isn't worth stealing.

Lots of stuff is, and college textbooks are a stand-out example.

The printer has a valid concern, because he may be the Deepest Pockets in the deal, and printers have long been held liable for what they copy.

I think you just hit an Automatic Challenge. Once someone looked at the material (not wide interest, internal info echoes the ship-to address), they saw it was low-risk and OKed it.

 

[pucho812]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpnxGCCQIW4

 

[PRR]

I found a mini-bike forum where users comment that the manuals for their chinese mini-bikes are clearly copied from other brands. Part numbers changed but some original brand-names remain.

Again I think over-price text-books are the poster-child for copyright verification.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I found a mini-bike forum where users comment that the manuals for their chinese mini-bikes are clearly copied from other brands. Part numbers changed but some original brand-names remain.

Again I think over-price text-books are the poster-child for copyright verification.

Yup, in the MI industry there was one company (huge now and cleaned up their act after getting big) but managed very quick massive growth to get there by cherry picking and copying category killer products often made by small companies without IP protection.

A friend of mine who wrote owners manuals for the company he worked at reported that they copied major parts of his manual text verbatim, when they copied his company's product. When they copied one of my small mixers, they literally copied my mixer's published spec sheet exactly.  Since I added a little windage to be conservative and rounded off some  specs to whole dB, the odds that they made the exact same judgements after measuring "their" mixer are zero and none.  They probably needed to print up literature for a trade show before they had an actual production unit to measure so just copied my data sheet too.  :-X

They even copied one of my patented products but secured their own patent for a variant and won (didn't lose) in court when Peavey sued them for patent infringement... Very disappointing (IMO they should have lost)  but hats off to their lawyers, and I can't argue with the courts (well I shouldn't).

JR

 

[Gustav]

college textbooks are a stand-out example.

Theres a local copy-shop here that has compendiums for various courses. For some, the teachers send them the curriculum direct and inform the students, for others, they just look up the curriculum, get the books and do it.

Mostly law/medicine/economy etc.

I think my Economics and International Relations books were examples of books that cost well over 150 euros a piece. I think they made a new revision of that type of books each year with a lot of clever non-essential changes (like the order of end-of-chapter work questions, chapter sequencing, page numbering etc). That way, buying a used book for a course was more a hassle, even if the content was basically the same.

Gustav