Butkus Camera Manual Site Suspended?

<p>I tried to view an Ansco manual and when I clicked the PDF, it said the account has been suspended. Are you experiencing the same?</p>

<p>Same thing happened last year at this time. Could be a DMCA complaint, but could be an overdue annual domain registration issue. I know of other one-person operation hobbyist sites that experience annual lapses when folks forget to update the domain registration.</p>

<p>And there may be a surge in DMCA complaints. My Mediafire host is auto-deleting dozens of my audio files, apparently using a bot that searches for suspicious keywords. I record a lot of off-air pirate radio programs, mostly scratchy, hissy and fadey shortwave broadcasts, and apparently the bot flagged the word "pirate" as suspicious and deleted everything with that word in the filename or description. It's not pirated music or IP, just a descriptive file name.</p>

<p>I just typed in butkus camera manuals, and the site came up with no trouble.<br>

11:20pb pst</p>

The site's there; it looks like the file hosting account has been suspended.

<p>Oh, well, that's unfortunate. I sent him a contribution a while back...he's a great resource, and it's not like anyone actually *buys* old camera manuals from the copyright holders. Makes no sense.</p>

<p>Are there copyright holders? They are instruction manusls, not artworks.</p>

<p>Works OK for me. Don't panic! Yours will come up soon.</p>

<p>Glad that his site is back up. Butkus is a national treasure for having such a great website, and his manuals are cheap as can be. Often I don't even download a manual, just peek at it to get what I needed to know. Then, about this time of year (glad I saw this post to remind me), I start to feel guilty and send him money thru Paypal. His manuals have helped me out many, many times.</p>

Steve Smith wrote:

"Are there copyright holders? They are instruction manusls, not artworks."

 

YES! Unless enough time has passed for the copyright to expire, all intellectual works recorded in a physical medium are protected by

copyright. It is the manner in which the information is expressed, not the information itself, that is protected. The genre is unimportant.

 

You can write your own version of an instruction manual that essentially contains the same information as the manufacturer's manual, but

you cannot put your name on its manual or reproduce and publish copies of the original manual or appropriate to your own use significant

portion of the original that exceed the fair use (fair dealing) exception.

 

I suspect most manufacturers are happy to have Butkus around. They do not want to be bothered with maintaining an archive of really old

manuals. They want you to buy their current products but don't care that Butkus is serving an extremely limited niche market.

 

It's even possible that he has received permission to republish the manuals on his site.

I peek to see if a camera is something I want to own, then if the EBay gods smile, I buy the manual.

A bit off the topic and I apologize. Lex

are you saying there is software on

your computer that is automatically

deleting audio files? Although I listen to

pirates I don't record them but do

have a lot of audio files on one

machine.

 

Rick H.

<p>Steve - the site is still down, when you click on the PDF link attachment, you get:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.cameramanuals.org/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi">http://www.cameramanuals.org/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi</a></p>

<p>I will email Mike and see what he is up to.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Steve Smith wrote: "Are there copyright holders? They are instruction manuals, not artworks."</p>

</blockquote>

<p><br /> Pretty much everything published in the US since the invention of Mickey Mouse (no joke, sadly) is still under copyright. Whenever the copyright on Mickey is about to expire, the media companies turn on their big lobbying guns and get Congress to pass a copyright extension bill "because if they don't, Western Civilization will end" or something like that.<br>

<br /> I agree Butkus is a treasure. I try to send him a check every so often, because I can't keep track of the number of times I use his site to check something out. I would not want to think too hard about the amount of effort he has put into scanning and organizing those documents, never mind getting permission from all the companies to do it.</p>

The domain name registration is up to date. He has a dedicated server. Perhaps he neglected to renew his server rental

or ISP hosting account.

 

cameramanuals.org is hosted on a dedicated server

 

Domain ID:D105549045-LROR

 

Domain Name:CAMERAMANUALS.ORG

 

Created On:10-Jan-2005 17:00:50 UTC

 

Last Updated On:04-Jan-2011 00:06:23 UTC

 

Expiration Date:10-Jan-2015 17:00:50 UTC

 

Sponsoring Registrar:Omnis Network LLC (R101-LROR)

 

Status:OK

<p>This is where I've always gone for Mike's manuals...it is running fine:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.butkus.org/chinon/">http://www.butkus.org/chinon/</a></p>

<p>It is 1:32 CST and I just tried his site and everything seems to be working fine, I opened a couple of manual files just to check, and encountered no problems.</p>

<p>Still getting the account suspended message (15:21 in DC).</p>

<p>I also get the "account suspended message," but only when I try to open the .pdf manuals. My Adobe Reader is the latest version, so who knows what's wrong? I've used Mike Butkus' site many times. It's a real treasure.</p>

<h2><strong>I get "</strong>This Account Has Been Suspended" at 4:35 EST</h2>

<p>Well finally, I'm in synch with everybody else....can no longer open pdf files with the message cited above. Not sure why I could get them to open earlier this afternoon when everybody else was having trouble. I hope the site isn't closed because something has happened to Mike and he is unable to pay his fees.</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>"A bit off the topic and I apologize. Lex are you saying there is software on your computer that is automatically deleting audio files? Although I listen to pirates I don't record them but do have a lot of audio files on one machine. --Rick H."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Nope, not auto-deleting from my computer. My off-air recordings of shortwave pirate radio broadcasts are hosted online, mostly on Mediafire and the Internet Archive. I also have them backed up on CD/DVD. It was probably a bad idea to use the word "pirate" as part of the keyword and file name. I've used these off-air recordings for the benefit of the broadcasters as part of a signal report. Helps give them an idea of how their signals and audio processing are coming across to listeners.</p>

<p>However, storing everything in the cloud or on remotely accessible devices is the direction the world is going. If the misguided SOPA/PIPA movement gets its way (meaning, entertainment industry gangsters bribe enough federal government officials), everything will be in the "cloud", so our saved files can be auto-deleted at whim.</p>

<p>Even files stored on Kindle e-readers can be deleted by Amazon if they choose to do so - for example, if Amazon receives a DMCA complaint about my copies of books and audiobooks in the public domain (nothing recent, mostly stuff like P.G. Wodehouse, Lewis Carroll, etc.), Amazon can access my device and delete unapproved files. The only way to circumvent this is to disable all wireless connectivity. But I'm not worried because I got the Kindles specifically for the convenience, since Amazon does a good job of auto-updating the operating system and making things as easy as possible for users.</p>

 

<p>By the way, regarding the issue of avoiding the risk of our online files being inappropriately deleted, there is an alternative: Set up your own web server at home.</p>

<p>I'm not advocating piracy, copyright violations or theft of intellectual property. Far from it.</p>

<p>However, my experience with Mediafire reveals the risk of hosting files in the cloud or remote hosts. A simple keyword, file name or other indicator may be misinterpreted by a maintenance bot. Poof. There goes your archived file.</p>

<p>I could just as easily have used the word "pirate" as part of the file name or keyword to describe a photo of my nephew in his Halloween costume, dressed as a pirate. If I had used Mediafire as my interim remote backup plan while on the road and, before I could get home to burn additional copies, my equipment and media cards were stolen... well, tough luck. Those photos would be gone forever.</p>

<p>If you use your own server at home or elsewhere, you can avoid some risks of arbitrary, inaccurate DMCA complaints wiping your files or making them inaccessible. A DMCA complaint could still be filed against your ISP, but as long as your personal server is secure the data is still there.</p>

<p>However hosting your own server is a huge PITA and security risk. I know of folks who do this and even though they're fairly web savvy their sites and servers have been compromised (for example, by Wordpress or MediaWiki exploits).</p>

<p>With professional remote hosts you can usually (not always) trust them to handle the security issues. But you can't necessarily trust them to leave your files the hell alone or at least send you a notice before locking down or deleting your files.</p>

<p>It's just this sort of thing that keeps me in the custom hosting business. Boutique arrangements make for more case-by-case handling of this sort of stuff when it's not as cut and dry as just some kid serving up ripped DVDs. Commodity hosting providers have to carry on in a factory-like way, else they can't possibly afford to provide their service for just a few dollars a month. And that means necessarily uncritical responses to third party complaints, and erring on the side of caution when it comes to getting caught up in intellectual property squabbles. <br /><br />My company gets to know every hosted customer, what they do, and how they use our infrastructure - the national brands, and the mom-and-pop hobby sites alike. Choosing customers well means I've managed to never - not once - had to field a single take-down request or even an IP inquiry in 15+ years in that line of work.<br /><br />As Lex indicates, keeping things secure is a big deal, server-side. Managed services (having someone else deal with the server plumbing) is a big part of what you buy if you don't want your server's upkeep to be your own problem.</p>

<p>I just tried Butkus, but got the account suspended message when I tried to download a manual.</p>

<p>I really hope this is a temporary hitch.</p>

<p>I just got one with no problems... I hope it's taken care of by now.</p>