Originally Posted by
Sheluma
PS -- If you're not violating copyright, Google is not likely to remove it. One can report to Google that his rights have been violated, but not the rights of someone else. If the (previous) owner knows that their copyright has expired, they're not likely to make a false report. They would lose credibility because it's public information and not hard to verify. Google is on a mission to make non-copyrighted publications available to the public. QB is a different story.
It all makes sense sometimes, doesn't it? Nobody's making or losing money out of sharing this information so there's no theft. Singer offers their manuals as downloads anyway and the only reason Baer and Rempel (for example) don't is that they don't exist.
There's only winners and if someone finds that some stuff they bought 30 years ago includes copyrights for things that haven't quite expired yet but are being shared, what will they do? Sue someone who has no money and is only trying to help other people? No. Even if anyone is this type of evil it still has to start with a "cease and desist" letter and there's no lost earnings. People are so frightened when it comes to copyright and it's unnecessary. You're more likely to be sued for selling second hand original manuals or the PDF versions: The former because you're doing Singer out of $15 (they sell some paper manuals) and the latter because you are actually stealing (charging money for someone else's work) unless you're paying royalties.
The reason humans are such a successful animal is because they share information freely. There was a time it was restricted in our recent history so that only the wealthy had access, and this was known as "the dark ages".
OK, end of rant
