Are Old Ford Shop manuals Copyright protected? I just purchased the 5 volume set for a 1973 Car Shop Manual and I was wondering if I'd get in trouble if I scanned them into PDF files for my fellow Maverick nuts.
Don't people sell manuals as PDFs on ebay all the time? Haven't seen them for Mavericks, but for other cars... Maybe send one of them a message asking how they can do it?
Usually there would be a copyright protection notice inside a book (check for yourself) but these manuals don't have any.
Since most of them were printed before scanners were made for home use, and they have a big "FORD" logo on them, I would say "yes" they are, but I'm sure Ford has better things to do than worry about it. That's alot of scanning......
Yes....they are copywrited. Also...I think CD's of all Ford Manuals are already available. I see them all over ebay.
I have both the 5 volume original paper books and the CD pdf's. They are availible quite cheap (the cd's) Its not worth the paper to have to scan all of that.
If I remember correctly, forum member "pegasus" got the OK from Ford to reproduce the manuals. Dont know if he ever got the project off the ground.
Some more (old) info http://mmb.maverick.to/showthread.php?t=3502 http://mmb.maverick.to/showthread.php?t=853
Not every publication is automatically copyrighted. If there's no copyright notice anywhere in the book, (which would be pretty surprising, but possible) I'd say do what you want with it. If this type of thing is all over eBay, that's probably why.
