Toshiba Stingy with Laptop Service Manuals
December 12, 2012
We’ve noted an interesting stance by Toshiba, a company on track to become the new Sharp or Sony. The Australian blog Future Proof complains about “Toshiba Laptop Service Manuals and the Sorry State of Copyright Law.” It seems that Future Proof blogger Tim proudly maintains a section wherein he freely shares as many laptop service manuals as he can get his hands on. Toshiba, though, has now told him to keep his virtual mitts off their copyrighted material. Tim is unhappy about the move.
The piece shares Toshiba’s reasons for issuing the cease-and-desist, then refutes each in turn. Safety? You’ve got to be kidding me, says Tim. Proprietary information? Well, other manufacturers do not share Toshiba’s concern, so how secret can this stuff be? Manuals are only for authorized service providers, Toshiba insists. Tim can’t argue with the truth of that one, but considers is unreasonably restrictive. The manuals are copyrighted, they say. Well, yes, that’s rather the issue, isn’t it? The post opines:
“As the original author of their laptop repair manuals, Toshiba owns the copyright on them and has the legal right to control their dissemination. They have not followed in the footsteps of other companies and made the decision to disseminate them to the public for open use. They are, in fact, tightly limiting access to their manuals only to their authorised repairers, and as such locking its customers out from information they could use to service or repair their laptops on their own.”
I have a certain amount of sympathy for a company that may be trying to protect its authorized service providers. However, since other players in the field, like Dell, HP, and Lenovo are more willing to allow open access to their information, Toshiba looks like the outlier here. Will pressure from consumers stirred up by Future Proof make any difference?
Cynthia Murrell, December 12, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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