Tim Hicks is a 25-year-old Australian with an interesting hobby: He trawls the nooks and crannies of the internet looking for manufacturer service manuals and posts the PDFs online for free. Hicks was frustrated that there wasn’t a single website out there with every laptop service manual. He started the site – aptly named "Tim’s Laptop Service Manuals" – because he fixes laptops himself.

Tim's site now streams over 50 gigabytes of manuals every day. Or rather ... it used to. In a recent strongly worded cease-and-desist letter, Toshiba’s lawyers forced Tim to remove manuals for over 300 Toshiba laptops.

Tim’s many fans have expressed surprise at Toshiba’s onslaught – check out some of the Reddit commentary – and I’m outraged, too. Not just because of this specific case, but because of what it means for the lifetime of our devices, the future of repair and e-waste, and the *abuse of copyright law as a weapon *for planned obsolescence.

Keeping manuals off the internet ensures the only path for beleaguered customers is sending broken devices back to high-priced, only-manufacturer-authorized service centers. By making it so expensive and inconvenient to repair broken electronics, this policy amounts to planned obsolescence: many people simply throw the devices away.

Toshiba has discovered a new way to enforce such planned obsolescence by cutting the repair market off from critical service information. But the cost to society is significant: The e-waste problem is growing; we’re losing thousands of domestic jobs as independent repair shops shut down; and consumers are being forced to replace their hardware much frequently than they should have to.

The Shady World of Online Manuals ———————————

Many manufacturers don’t publish manuals online, so they’re only available from third-party sites with suspicious names like “Givemefile.net” and “download-service-manuals.com.” These sites create networks of ad-riddled pages for each file in an elaborate dance to boost their Google juice above their competitors’.

Downloading manuals in this shady world means finding the one good link in a page of misleading ads … and then praying that the file just downloaded isn’t infected with malware.

Tim is one of the good guys. His site is ad-free and supported by donations. Tim’s website benefits everyone from service technicians to nonprofits like Computers for Schools. It also benefits a number of small and local businesses, since the manuals he posts fuel a number of repair shops – especially those doing service after the warranty expires. (Most neighborhood computer repair shops aren’t authorized by the manufacturer to service computers within the warranty period; these shops function independently of the big OEMs, much like local automotive repair shops.)

Killing the manuals kills these businesses. Repair isn’t economically viable without manuals: To service any complex product, repair shops need the service information encapsulated in the manuals.

[#contributor: /contributors/592667d4f3e2356fd8009245]|||Kyle Wiens is the co-founder and CEO of iFixit, an online repair community and parts retailer internationally renowned for their open source repair manuals and product teardowns. Launched out of his Cal Poly college dorm room in 2003, iFixit has now empowered upwards of 15 million people to repair their broken stuff.|||

The Copyrighting Game ———————

In the automotive world, federal legislation requires auto manufacturers to provide manuals to independent shops. Some organizations, like AllData and Mitchell 1, collect manuals from every manufacturer, bundle them together, and sell subscriptions – creating jobs for their over 100,000 mechanics. Independent shops wouldn’t be able to repair modern cars without this information.

Unfortunately, there’s no equivalent legislation for electronics. An uneasy detente exists between independent service shops and manufacturers through a "grey market" of information where service and repair information gets out through unofficial channels. Authorized technicians leak the manuals to people like Tim, who post it online; the service shops aren’t breaking any laws when they use these manuals to fix our computers.

But sites like Givemefile.net, download-service-manuals.com, and Tim’s are breaking the law. It's illegal to redistribute copyrighted service manuals without manufacturer consent. Even so, a number of websites provide these critical documents to the service techs who need them. File sharing is a grey world.

The risk of being sued for copyright infringement is great enough that some organizations (like mine) don’t share OEM manuals at all for fear of reprisals; potential penalties can be as high as $150,000 per document. Yet this is a strong deterrent only theoretically, because copyright claims are only intermittently enforced. Tim hosted Toshiba’s manuals for three years before he heard from the company. (And he was fortunate: Toshiba was satisfied once Tim removed the information.)

Copyright law does exist for good reasons. It’s designed to promote creativity by protecting content creators for a limited period of time. And you can copyright a poem, but you can’t copyright facts like torque specifications. So even though you can't copyright an actual disassembly process, service manuals are a copyrightable piece of writing considered a "creative work."

I’ve seen first-hand how tight a grip manufacturers have on critical repair documentation. Major electronics manufacturers like Apple and Toshiba do copyright their service manuals; Apple has been using legal threats to keep its manuals offline for years. In fact, this information vacuum is what drove me to start iFixit. Instead of reproducing Apple's service manuals, though, our community dismantles their products, figures out how to fix them, and writes completely original service manuals – free of Apple’s copyright claims.

The Universal Right to Repair —————————–

How did Toshiba justify its decision to censor its own repair documentation? Besides the obvious – and strongest – claim of copyright, the company cites reasons such as “endangering [users’] wellbeing” and concerns about “proprietary information.”

The first one is particularly ridiculous, since there are very few ways you can hurt yourself taking apart a laptop (especially when you've taken out the battery and you know how to discharge a capacitor). Ironically, taking away authorized repair manuals will make things even more unsafe because people won’t stop opening their electronics – they just won’t have guidance for how to do it anymore.

As for proprietary information – by the time people are fixing these laptops, the information is so out of date it’s irrelevant to Toshiba’s competition. The electronics industry moves too quickly for this to be a serious concern.

By using copyright law to cut off independent service shops from the information they need to function, Toshiba is essentially stifling the resale market. Its actions also hurt Toshiba customers by reducing the resale value of Toshiba products. Apparently, some IT departments are already considering shifting their budget away from Toshiba products toward more repairable computers. Procurement policies are a powerful tool for change. (EPEAT, the green federal procurement tool, was used to pressure Apple this summer. So I have high hopes for this process ... even though EPEAT temporarily caved in to Apple.)

If market forces are unable to persuade Toshiba to reverse course, we may need to force them to. When the auto manufacturers refused to provide independent shops with the information needed to fix cars, consumers banded together for Right to Repair legislation, which passed just last week. There's no reason we can't do the same.

>If market forces are unable to persuade Toshiba to reverse course, we may need to force them to.

It's time for big manufacturers to stop hiding behind copyright laws and stop keeping independent repair technicians in the dark.

This information needs to be free. The world desperately needs to know how to fix these products. Electronics repair is critically needed to solve the e-waste crisis; it helps bridge the digital divide by keeping secondhand electronics and developing countries’ markets alive; and it accounts for hundreds of thousands of jobs in the United States alone.

So if you’re considering buying a Toshiba laptop, don’t. And if you’re a current owner, write Toshiba and tell them their actions are reprehensible. Buy from manufacturers who do make service documentation available online, like Dell, HP, or Lenovo.

This should be true for our other purchasing choices, too: Because the problem is not unique to Toshiba. No cell phone manufacturer, for example, makes its service manuals available. Outside of the heavy equipment industry (where customers demand the information) and the automotive industry (where legislation requires publication), it’s a rare manufacturer that doesn’t use copyright as a tool for controlling us consumers.

But I’m not going to wait for Toshiba: We’re raising funds and hardware on Indiegogo to collaboratively write open source manuals to replace the ones Toshiba forced Tim to take down.

Wired Opinion Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90