RE: re CarDisk continued AD V7 #438

["Brian Shorey" <bshorey@xxxxxxxxx>]

>      I'd be real interested in your "good authority".  I've known
> Leo since long before he started the cardisk project (mainly as a
> service to folks without the paper manuals).... I've loaned him a
> couple hundred pounds of my manuals to help with his project...
> hoping he'll get around to one for my passion, the Giulia sedan
> line.   The permissions he was given were informal, almost
> certainly to avoid setting precedents, but they were given.  If
> you think about it, it would make no sense for Alfa to kill a
> project that would help keep alfas on the road in one of the
> larger markets that they have yet to re-enter.   They have no
> money to lose and, if nothing else, it keeps down requests to
> Alfa for books that they no longer sell.  Alfa had no
> compunctions a while back in Australia (where they are back in
> the market) when sending their lawyers after the local clubs that
> they considered infringing on their copyrighted logos.

<snip>

>      No flame intended to you, just remember that a bad word,
> once uttered, cannot be taken back.  I feel kinda strongly on
> this, as I mentioned when the digest got littered with comments
> on exposing the shop in Mass. that blew a year long repair job on
> a Milano.... but then refunded the money... a reasonable thing to
> do.  I'm glad their name wasn't unfairly smeared.

a few comments:

first, i can't divulge my 'authority', it was told to me in confidence.  the
gist of the conversation was that alfa does not seem to be inclined to
enforce copyrights in cases such as this one.  perhaps leo spoke to somebody
from alfa and was told that they would not enforce any copyrights?  it was
made quite clear, however, that there is no formal agreement.

if i remember the australian case, it was the local agent that was giving
the club all kinds of trouble over the use of the logo, but when alfa romeo
was contacted the local agent backed off rather quickly.

that said, i did not intend my post to be an attack on leo, or cardisk.
after re-reading it however, i probably should have worded things
differently.  i'm a satisfied user of his product, having bought four of
them.

aside from that, part of what i was trying to get across was that digesters,
should they decide to market a product based on converting cardisk files,
may be violating somebody's property rights (and i think we all agree on
that), but the assumption that if alfa manuals were scanned as the source
then there would be no copyright issues is flawed.  alfa romeo holds
copyright on all of it's printed materials, so some kind of indication from
them that they're ok to reproduce would be necessary.

my apologies to leo and cardisk for the wording of my post.

bs

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