Old Electronics Kit Manuals Forced Offline Thanks To Copyright

from the can't-learn-unless-you-pay dept

If you're unfamiliar with the important history of Heathkit and its popular electronics and computer "kits," it's worth reading the Wikipedia entry on Heathkit to get some background. The company and its products were an important part of the post-WWII "tinkerers" era. However, one of our readers, Joseph Durnal, just discovered something rather disturbing. Even though the company stopped making and selling kits back in 1992, it apparently just sold the copyrights on its old manuals to another company, which is going around forcing any old manuals offline and demanding people buy them instead:

On October 30, 2008, Data Professionals of Pleasanton, CA purchased the Intellectual property of the Heathkit legacy products from Heathkit in Benton Harbor, Michigan. This rights to these legacy products also includes the copyright. All free manuals have been removed from this site in compliance with copyright laws.

So, now, anyone still playing around with decades old Heathkit products can't look online for some information from a missing manual, but instead is expected to pay up for a reprint.

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