MiTasol
1st Lieutenant
The library that has the manual that has the pages I need for completing the Panther manual I have posted at RAF engine documents has replied and will send me 600 dpi scans of the six pages today but there is one problem. The idiotic Australian Copyright Act - 2019 allows them to provide copies only if I sign a declaration that comes direct from the Act.
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The pages I want have been out of copyright since 1958 but the act has no provision for libraries to provide copies of material that is out of copyright!!!!!!!
According to the sign in the Hamilton library last time I was there the Kiwi act is basically if it is out of print and cannot be obtained from another source your library can copy it.
As part of my "research" to request the library concerned allow me to post these 6 pages on line I looked at the UK copyright act to determine the actual copyright expiry date on the manual and I found that the Australian Copyright Act 2019 is 689 pages, the Australian Patents Act is a further 250 pages and the Australian Trade Marks act an additional 245 pages being 1154 pages total while the UK has an older single Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 covering all areas covered by the above three Australian acts combined content in just 322 pages.
The older UK act is far better laid out and far far far easier to interpret.
As a general comment on Aus laws they are often badly conceived and badly written - for example when they bought out the first anti-bogus-parts law here it included the paragraph that used parts must be accompanied with a certificate stating that they were new.
If brains were gasoline then all the staff of the Aus Office of Legal Drafting combined would not have enough to start a cigarette lighter.
It has been one of those good news - bad news days.
The bad news is the new 1TB SSD in my main computer has failed. IF I am lucky I get it back late Friday.
The good news is related to the above post about the stupidity of the Aus Copyright Act. A friend went into one of the two libraries in that story and asked if he could copy those pages and they said no, the document is in a storage location and marked as fragile and then asked why. He showed them my email (same wording as above) and the person who he spoke to told him that this was a common problem and that the easy way around it was for them to scan the pages then post them on line for a short time. Because no-one has officially requested them they are not covered by the new copyright and because the original is out of copyright I can use them any way that I want. He will text me when done - they have a backlog of this sort of stuff so it will take a few weeks.
That library deserves a double bacon with a side of bacon but identifying them will probably turn the copyright nazis loose on them so I will not identify them.
EDIT And I have also just located another copy of the Panther manual and I will get my hands on it for a few hours on my next trip to Brisbane,
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