You appear to have a very short memory regarding TEK. Up unil recently, a retired TEK employee controlled all old manual sales and distribution. I think his name was Dean Kidder. Tek as far as I know, never made any attempts to enforce copyrights though. Otherwise, b4 the net, if you wanted copies of old manuals, you bent over and put on a pair of kneepads. Tucker pretty much became the first source for test equipment with other test surplus places like Fair Radio, Hobby Industries for amateur (ex. WRL), several sources for HiFi equipment, usually old shops that were running a manual op from their archives and of course Sams which was reverse engineered. Then we had some independents like this W7 character that had a bit of everything. Most all these places were photocopy by the page. It wouldn't be until the net and flat bed scanners that this monopoly would be threatened. If you looked in old publications like the yellow sheets and magazines for mail away lists of manuals from in many cases long closed service shops were milking their old files for a prince's ransom. This guy is just doing the same thing, but a little late in the game. Most of the most sought after heath test,computer, and amateur products of the 70's to the end were scanned by Richard Pestinger and were available on his website. The lists there used to be active links until Data Pro shut him down. Most all of them are in the wild anyways on foreign servers and by request on Yahoo's heathkit group. Some were outright impossible to get a copy from Heathkit when they were still open. You could get a condensed manual from them for a relatively inexpensive price or copies of most popular stuff from the 50's and early 60's, but in some cases, they didn't have it on file in products such as hi fi, automotive, and other consumer products. They would do their best though. I tried to get a manual for a 70's vintage integrated amp back in the late 80's. They sent me a hodgepodge of documentation of the same boards from other receivers that used them also. Many companies didn't have manuals or service docs after a few years, but maintained a microfiche base for their service centers that had loan access to such as Sony. Pre-net was a rough time for older equipment and probably the reason so much was either destroyed or cannibalized. You either paid several times what the you paid for the used gear for a copy of docs or deep sixed it.
And in complete and total contrast, Textronix explicitly releases ALL of there old manuals into the wild:
http://www.tek.com/manual/manuals-download-agreement
Lets see somebody try this with the service manual for my 465...
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