I just noticed this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&?ViewItem&item=7965923034

I'm not 100% sure, but I just downloaded 14 sections of the 122 Amazon Parts catalog for FREE at GCP (gcp.se). If this is the same (and it looks to be the exact same files), then isn't it illegal to sell CDs containing free information on eBay? Should I report this? $25.00 is a lot of money for people to fork out for something you could download for free.
--
Six Volvos: all wagons.... 1972 145S, 1976 245 DL, 1983 245 GL, 1986 740 GLE, 1990 740 GL, now a 1995 940. Number 7 (a 1967 122S Wagon) is on the way.... Who needs a sedan, when you've got storage compartments in a wagon?

Can't be any different from a title search company charging you $400+ to do what you can do for free at the county recorder.

You are paying for leg-work pure and simple.

If you had bought a "link" to someone else's site, well, you would have a legitimate gripe (but weren't they clever?)! My daughter got stung by one of those for Pierre cardin bags or luis Vuitton or some-such. Needless to say she learned to read the print and be careful with her money.

Hail free enterprise.

Cheaters get their due in due time.

--
Mike!

Scandcar sells their own version of repair manuals and parts catalogs on CD-ROM, copied from original Volvo material, and it doesn't seem that either Volvo or anyone else has given Sjef a hard time about it. Some people seem to prefer the one produced in Poland better because it is a bit easier to navigate. Less ethical than our Polish friend, is the Canadian chap who simply copied the Pole's versions and is now also selling them on e-Bay. We've had a go-around on this subject on this board before, and people seem to come down either side of the issue in about even numbers. Me, I'm for Sjef and the Pole and against the Canadian, but, what the heck, I'm not going to get too up-tight about who copies Volvo's manuals and for how much. If you want to download them for free, that's what they are there for, and if you want to pay for having someone else do it for you, it's your decision -- no one says you have to. I feel different about literature, music, and other stuff that required a true creative effort to produce.
Bob S.

The point here is that the seller is not disclosing that these are copies of files available for FREE from an online source. It's underhanded, and no volvo driver should be exploiting other volvo drivers this way.

If they freely disclosed that such files are available for download but that buying this CD will save you time, or that they have improved the files is some value-added way, then, sure. I'd have no problem with it. That's not the case, however. If they offered a bound and printed version, I'd buy it myself. Selling already "free" electronic files is BS way to do business.

The volvo-way is not to deceive people into thinking that they ware getting a quality product. To me and many others, Volvo means Quality. If I was a buyer of one of these CDs, I'd claim "fraud" if I paid good money for such an item, only to find out that is was an electronic copy of electronic files already free online.



--
Six Volvos: all wagons.... 1972 145S, 1976 245 DL, 1983 245 GL, 1986 740 GLE, 1990 740 GL, now a 1995 940. Number 7 (a 1967 122S Wagon) is on the way.... Who needs a sedan, when you've got storage compartments in a wagon?

I understand your position and I have no quarrel with it., and, please, don't take my remarks as critcism. The point I was trying to make was that, with all the nefarious nonsense going on in business, on and off the web, I prefer to reserve my indignation for weightier issues than who tries to make a fast buck off stuff that is essentially in the public domain, and that most folks who have been around this board and other Volvo sites for a while know where to find. If they don't, all they have to do is ask and in the customary BB helpful spirit they'll receive half a dozen pointers. I was simply assuming that most people who buy these discs did so with their eyes wide open. Before this new technology came along we were being xeroxed Volvo manuals and paying a lot more money for them.
Bob S.

This is a simple case of copyright theft. There is simply
no way that this seller has the right to sell copies of this
stuff.

You have the right to download the material from the gcp.se
(who I assume have the right to allow you to make that copy).
You have the right to do whatever you want with the copy you
downloaded, including update it, clean it up, whatever. You
do *not* have the right to redistribute it in any form. You
can sell your original copy of it, but only if you don't
retain any of the copies you made of it as well.

I could sell an audio copy of "Harry Potter and the Magic
Throne" by reading into a microphone then copying that to a CD
and selling the CD. Simply because I *can* do it doesn't make
it legal, even if I put my own work into it; the "book on tape"
verison is simply a derivitive of the original and now has two
copyrights -- the original and my audio version.

As to if Ebay will do anything about it? I dunno.

Of course, I am not a lawer (or a librarian, for that matter)
so I could easily be dead wrong. And, also, if you live in some
parts of the world where copyright laws are not terribly
developed, different rules apply...
chris

I'm not into start a fight or take any side, but you are very wrong in one thing:

Volvo NEVER copyrighted ANY of their litterature - in fact Volvo only stated: "May be copied if source is mentioned".

So everybody can do what some of these guys have done. Another thing is: -Who says the seller has copied from gcp.se??

If someone really scanned all the pages and clean out the yellowness of the older paper, then it's a good value I think. The time alone would kill ALL benefit in doing it myself - way more easy to just pay off someone $25, takes 2 seconds and I'm back at working on my car!!


--
/Soren

Soren

Good words, source attribution is always a mandatory practice in my work.

If I had a copy of the "so called" pirated files in hand. I could tell in just a couple minutes from handwritten notes added over the years, but that is really moot point.

I scanned and scanned and touched up an cleaned up and all the other aspects of digitizing the files starting piecemeal from the GCP site until I found I could download the complete pdfs in one fell swoop. I put nearly 15 hours into the first 400 pages (and I'm pretty fast). This is starting form the clean scans on the website. You are exactly correct on scanning from paper, the cleanup is laborious and not even remotely cost effective. 25 dollars is a tremendous value if one doesn't have a high speed connection. The total download from GCP is on the high side of 70 Meg!

I'm with you, I spend all week in front of a publishing workstation and fun is best for me with a wrench in hand!!

Mike

I'll reinterate my point. These CDs are not being sold as "Save Download Time" products, they are being sold as an original product that the author claims to have assembled from source. I have my doubts, but I'll take a closer look when the copy I'm being given arrives. So we'll see.
--
Six Volvos: all wagons.... 1972 145S, 1976 245 DL, 1983 245 GL, 1986 740 GLE, 1990 740 GL, now a 1995 940. Number 7 (a 1967 122S Wagon) is on the way.... Who needs a sedan, when you've got storage compartments in a wagon?

It depends on how much it is worth to you to spend your time downloading
and assembling something like that. Note that a lot of programs that you
can download have a fee attached if you buy the CD. BUT if you have the
CD and your HD crashes, you can reload the CD.

Figure yourself working at some job that pays $30-50/hour for however many
hours a day you want to work. Would you spend all day downloading something
like that when you could get the CD for $25?
--
George Downs Bartlesville, Heart of the USA!

Good Point!

On a good normal day, it would probably only take let's say 5 minutes to do the purchase, pay and email - that means, that you "spended" $2.50-4.17 worth out of your working hours!

To download, save and file the pages on gcp.se, looks to me to be at LEAST a days work!

If a day is 8 working hours - you just saved between:

240 - 2.50 = $237.50,

and

400 - 4.17 = $395.83 !!!

Anyone who choose the option to do the job himself, has completely misunderstood the "Cost/Benefit"-idea!

:-) Thumbs up!

OH!.. If it takes 5 minutes to buy, but 8 hours to download - why not choose to buy and have 7 hours and 55 minutes more with your Volvo and not your chinese Intell Premium Unleaded??!


Oh.. What's the cost of having access to the Internet in US? Do you pay by traffic? Or do you just have unlimitted access and up/download?
Here in Denmark some pay by the traffic - arround 0.08 - 0.10 per Mb up/downloaded! - well - $25 gives you 250 Mb's - but that's to be ON TOP of the time spended.. What does electricity cost? Depreciation on the computer?

Arghh..!!!

I so much LOVE the extreme valuable fact, that I live in the free World!
--
/Soren

A very good economic argument - if you have a slow path to the internet. But it sounds like the question relates to ebay rules against duping ppl into paying for something that costs nothing. Prolly most people earning at the rate you cite have a computer and connection that can absorb what can fit on a CD in the background in about 5-10 minutes. If ebay does have such a rule, they are in effect restricting trade, perhaps to offset the cost of handling complaints.

Yes, it took all of 5 minutes for me to download the 14 files for the 122 and to rename them for consistency. The seller makes it sound as if there was labor involved, like scanning, and converting them to PDF. I think it's misleading, but perhaps there's more to the product than the advert suggests.


I e-mailed the seller regarding the item.
----
"What is the difference between *this* product and the 14 PDF parts catalogs made freely available by Genuine Classic Parts (http://www.gcp.se)?"
----

The response from the seller to my inquiry was this:
----
"This" product is from the same original source with a few exceptions. The pages have been cleaned up and placed in proper order. The number of languages in some instances have been reduces to English/Sweedish. Pages have been improved visually and cleaned up in photo software program.
----

Sounds like he/she did do *some* work, but IMHO, minor manipulation an existing electronic catalog in these ways (re-ordering, cleaning up a couple of B&W images) does not cross the threshold of "new work" nor would it transfer ownership or impart the ability to sell this item. If it were being printed and spiral bound, I'd certianly buy it to save me printing costs, but I think this item is BS and a screw-job for a lot of innocent buyers who think they are finding a rare item.


--
Six Volvos: all wagons.... 1972 145S, 1976 245 DL, 1983 245 GL, 1986 740 GLE, 1990 740 GL, now a 1995 940. Number 7 (a 1967 122S Wagon) is on the way.... Who needs a sedan, when you've got storage compartments in a wagon?

Jack

Adobe PDFs are my stock-in-trade as technical writer. I seriously doubt the guy extracted around 700 pages of images to clean them up, especially with the quality of these PDFs these are really nice ones indeed.

I downloaded the same PDFs and the only thing I found wanting, was the lack of bookmarks to ease navigation. I added all the bookmarks I require in about 20 minutes. If he did all the work he stated, he was wasting his time, IMHO. He should have been workin on his car... That's much more fun!

From a legal standpoint, here is little to believe that the original author (Volvo) views the work as any more than public domain. To enforce one's copyright one has to be willing to enforce it, and Volvo, I am sure, considers the ill will generated from legal action to be a big negative.

I agree with you, printing and binding is the the only thing that could possibly be value-added and I use the digital document entirely.

I am OCRing all the images and creating a searchable PDF for my researching purposes.

As always, Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware! It may be a good deal for some, but for most, it is so readily available, it's just unneeded cost.

I DO give a very BIG Kudos to GCP for their extensive effort? Do believe it, when I say, they put some very serious labor into the digitization effort!!!

Thanks GCP!!!

Mike

"From a legal standpoint, here is little to believe that the original author (Volvo) views the work as any more than public domain. To enforce one's copyright one has to be willing to enforce it, and Volvo, I am sure, considers the ill will generated from legal action to be a big negative."

They haven't been afraid of any negative publicity or ill will they generate by actively going after anyone using 'Volvo' on a product (like the erstwhile IPD cast valve covers) or on a website (bet it's hard to find the word Volvo on this site - at least certinaly not in the 'Volvo' font).
--
I'm JohnMc, and I approved this message.

They are extremely protective of the Volvo name, the font it's in, the iron symbol, and any sort of logos or company emblems. That's why Volvomag is now VClassics, VolvoWorld is now VLVworld, and VolvoGirl is now offline.

They will make exceptions on a case-by-case basis for non-commercial use if you ask nicely in advance.

No product not manufactured by Volvo or its contractors can have the letters v-o-l-v-o on it in that order, period.

OTOH, I don't know of any case where they objected to reproduction and distribution of their manuals, parts lists, etc. I think there was once a policy permitting that explicitly, as long as it was acknowleged that Volvo was the source. This may or may not be true anymore.