Originally posted by: fleabag
if it was a rare or uncommon car it'd be one thing especially if it wasn't available elsewhere for free
...which you failed to distinguish in your original post. You originally implied that you'd go after everyone selling a copyrighted service manual on ebay in PDF / CD form, which I disagree with. I challenge you to find someone selling a legit copy of a service manual for a
WWII era Lincoln Zephyr V12, for example. Good luck with that. That was my point. Even if you did, it would obviously be a used copy - meaning that not a cent would find its way back to whoever holds the copyright. So it is sort of a moot point anyway.
but when it's a car that ISN'T that old and has its manuals available in various places, then I have to disagree. A 96 civic isn't THAT OLD and getting a manual for it certainly should NOT be a challenge.
I agree, to a point. However, service manuals for late model Civics are available for free download all over the internet. Are you going to track down all of the big bad copyright infringers and put a stop to it yourself? No? OK then. So why go after just those who do it on Ebay?
The ebay profiteers are - at worst - taking what's out there for anyone with an internet connection and a bit of common sense to find / download and making it easily available to uninformed noobs whose internet knowledge consists of knowing the basics on using Ebay and email, or, those who are still stuck on a dialup connection and can't really download a huge PDF file. For a price, of course. At best, they are providing access to information that would be unavailable otherwise, which is the case with the example I linked above.
You could argue that the "value added", if you want to think of it in those terms, is the fact that it is already put on CD and made available where it can easily be located, eliminating the hassle of searching for it, accessing it, and downloading it.
Being realistic though - say some HS kid just got his first car, a hand-me-down Civic from his grandmother. You really think this person is going to go out and drop hundreds of dollars on the actual factory service manual (NOT Haynes or Chilton's) when they probably have $20 to their name? Not likely.
Why do you care so much about this anyway? You sound like the kind of person who actually seeks out things to bitch and complain about just to make other people's lives miserable. Find a hobby or something, instead of starting some sort of stupid moral crusade against copyright infringers on the Internet.