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Are vintage Brochures, Owners and Service Manuals considered "Published"

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Unimatic1140

Junior Member
What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Minnesota

Hi everyone, there is a website out there called The Old Car Manual Project. They scan and provide thousands of vintage automobile service manuals, owners manuals, brochures and spec sheets produced by the automotive industry in the 20th century.

I run a website dedicated to vintage US made home appliances (washers, stoves, mixers, dishwashers, etc). I would like to do something similar so I have taken up a major study of copyright law to try to figure out what of my vintage appliance document collection is actually in the public domain. I have thousands of pre-1978 vintage appliance operating instruction guides, service manuals, owners manuals and glossy sales literature brochures. About 75% of my collection is not marked with any copyright declaration what so ever. On the 25% that is marked with a valid copyright notice I was able to find the copyright registration records and verify that re-registration had never occurred on nearly 99% of the materials (about 1% was re-registered and I realize that I cannot post those).

My question is on the materials that have no copyright designation what so ever. Under current law since all of these documents were printed before 1978 they would fall into the public domain at their inception. My concern is whether these documents are considered to be "published" for copyright considerations. Copyright terms are very different between published and unpublished works. These works were either provided with the appliance at time of purchase or you could have ordered a copy from the manufacturer even if you never purchased the product. Some companies gave them away for free, others for a small charge. Obviously brochures were given away for free either at retailers or by writing away to the company and requesting them. None of these materials are still available and most are extremely rare and only on extremely rare occasions do they even show up eBay or other auction sites.

I suspect that there will be no previous case law concerning such materials to reference in the past. So I guess I'm looking for advice and opinions on the possible liabilities involved.

Thanks again and I appreciate everyone assistance in this matter.
 
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FlyingRon

Senior Member
Brochures and manuals that are given or loaned to people other than the authors are considered publication. There is some argument on some items that are transferred under trade secret rules or other license trying to be considered unpublished, but usually that assertion ends up losing in the long run.

You seem to have a good understanding. These items indeed have passed into the public domain if they weren't marked at the time they were published in those years. It was not uncommon to forgo trying to assert copyright on such things.

Be very careful to not run afoul of TRADEMARK issues however. You don't want to associate your use of any brand names with the illusion that you are or are representing the manufacturer or trying to build on their marks for your gain.
 

Unimatic1140

Junior Member
Thank you so much FlyingRon! That is what I thought but wanted to be sure to cover all my bases. As for the trademark issue I became well aware of those issues during my study of copyright law, so I wrote my copyright & trademark statement/disclaimer for our new library as follows:

Copyright and Trademark Notices:
Most documents available in our Literature Center Library have been confirmed to be in the Public Domain by the United States Copyright Office due to expiration without re-registration or were confirmed in the public domain from their inception. All documents within the Literature Center may be downloaded and used by residents of the United States or residents of foreign countries where the work is also located in their Public Domain. Download and use of any document that in not in your country's public domain is prohibited. For any documents that still are under copyright status in the United States we have received written permission from the content owner to offer their works in our library.

No documents in our library has been created by oursitename.org or our company name, LLC. All works have been written and printed by the manufacturer(s) listed on the document themselves. Any trademarks appearing on this site or in these documents are the sole property of the registered owners. No endorsement by the trademark owners is to be construed, nor was any sought. The products, brand names, characters, related slogans and indicia are or may be claimed as trademarks of their respective owners. Any trademarks found in the domain name or in the content of this website are for descriptive, identification or informational purposes only. There is no business relationship between this domain and the trademark owners. The use of registered trademarks, in the domain name and the content of this website, is legally granted in the "nominative use" and "fair use" provisions in the Lanham Act. As such the use of this material falls under the Fair Use provisions of intellectual property laws.


I'm hoping that covers all the bases, I don't see how I could make it more clear, but you never know.

One other question on Trademarks. Let's take Whirlpool for example. In the 1950's Whirlpool trademark was a fancy vintage style script using a font that was quite popular at that time. Now obviously Whirlpool's name has not change but their logo font/style is completely different than it was 50 years ago. Is the old style trademark still a valid trademark or is it no longer considered their trademark since that particular design was abandoned decades ago?

Thank you again for your assistance.
 
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