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MG TD TF 1500 - W.K.F. Wood XPAG Document

W.K.F. Wood's Document, "The XPAG Engine, Data, Service, Super-Tuning", shows up on quite a few websites. It shows a copyright by him from 1968. I'm thinking about including a link to it in pdf form on Ttalk. Anybody have an idea of where I can go to get permission to do so? Or, is 47 years beyond the time span for coopyrights? I'm not one for plagiarizing. Bud
Bud Krueger

I believe that copyright on that would be 95 years, although I know copies circulate. I bought a dozen copies from an MG guy going out of business, only to find they were just photocopies of the original, probably improperly.

Tom Lange
Village Librarian
Somesville, Maine, USA
t lange

David Sander, on behalf of the New England MG T Register, has given me permission to share the W.K.F. Wood's document. If you have the TSO CD-ROM you can see that W.K.F. was a regular contributor to The Register from its earliest days. I should have the link to the document online this morning. Thank you David. Bud
Bud Krueger

It's up. http://www.ttalk.info/WKFWoodXPAG.html

Tom, I'll bet that's the same photocopy that we've all been using for the past many years. Bud
Bud Krueger

This is a great source. It would be even nicer if we could have it in a non-protected format which would allow for much greater search capabilities as well as the ability to save and print in other formats (word etc).
Geoffrey M Baker

The copy Bud posted is not protected -- it's just a plain pdf. You could print one page, all of it, or anything in between. To create it a paper copy was just scanned to pdf.

I was about to say that to be searchable someone would need to do OCR on it, but I just discovered it's already been done! Open it in Adobe, hit cmd-f (ctrl-f on a Windows machine) and search for your term....


Rob Edwards

Rob's right on. It's quite searchable/printable. Bud
Bud Krueger

This one seems to be everywhere using Google.

Something to note: Brooklands Books has obtained the copyright to most of the British car and many other manuals. They are very protective, rightfully, of their copyrights because this is how they recapture their investment and make money reselling out of print manuals.

So before you post a manual it is good to do like Bud did and certainly take an effort to investigate who might currently own the copyright.
Christopher Couper

So on this subject ...what do you make of this?
Page one of a CD I purchased years ago on Feebay.
(Obviously a scanned copy of the manual in pdf form.)

David Sheward 55 TF1500 # 7427

Page 2: I'm sure this will be familiar to most of us.
I have wondered about this for a while.
I see no "copyright info" in my hard copy manual.
Someone obviously scanned it (some of the scans are not done very well) and now claims to be the "copyright holder".
How does that work?

David Sheward 55 TF1500 # 7427

Someone you might want to contact, is the Rev. Dr. Dick Knudson who set up a well-known car book company - Britbooks - today run by his daughter Leesa and her husband.

Dick, a TC owner, has a PhD in English and has kept active in the literature field; and I expect he would be able to provide guidance on matters similar to these.

Dick also knew Wally Wood very well.

Contact me if anybody need some e-mail addresses.

Gord Clark
Rockburn, Qué.
Gord Clark

It's all very complicated but a new production of a work that is in the public domain (not or no longer protected by copyright) can be protected by copyright. For instance, assume "Mary had a little lamb ..." is in the public domain but I record myself operatically singing "Mary ..." The words I'm singing are not protected but my rendition of the song is so you can't sell copies of my recording w/o my permission which, because of my fantastic operatic voice, will cost you dearly. Now, this lawyer is going back into retirement. Jud
J K Chapin

Interesting thread.

I recently picked up a number of MG owners manuals. Two are yellow covers and say Distributed by Moss Motors LTD, Goleta CA.

So Moss must have gotten the right to reprint these.

Another is the TD owners manual. The manual is in near new condition. It does not say it is a reproduction and when compared to a copy that came with my car, it looks identical. There is nothing on it that says it is a reproduction. But it is in such good condition that it screams that it is.

Bruce TD4139 Cunha

Here is the Moss reproduction.



Bruce TD4139 Cunha

If you get a recent manual from Amazon, brought to you by Brooklands Books, you will find this modified copyright on it. They specifically told me that the manuals they reproduce they have purchased the rights to. This one is from a MGA Owners Handbook.

On top of that the original manuals for the TD never even mentioned any rights at all. It appeared to me they didn't even really care (think?) about this sort of thing. Remember at the time of the T cars, there really was no way to easily reproduce content like there is today.

This is actually how Brooklands Books got started. The original founder wanted a copy of a workshop manual for a BMC (BL?) car and was told they were no longer producing them. He inquired about what they wanted for the rights to the publication and the rest was history. BMC (BL?) was more concerned about the value of the content than the books themselves. Ie the workshop manual had information on what to do and how to do it.

I have to side with Jud. This whole copyright thing is very complicated and was made much worse when the US changed the copyright laws in 1984. Plus you add in foreign countries and companies that may have gone out of business before their assets were transferred, or some assets were transferred (ie tooling or publications) and others not, and then bad record keeping, and you have a screwed up mess. And don't get me started on the whole photo, music and video space which is another can of worms the internet is dealing with right now.




Christopher Couper

This thread was discussed between 28/03/2015 and 08/04/2015

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