united-states copyright intellectual-property
Copyright Enforcement of Specification Sheets
<p>For the sake of keeping this question focused, I am limiting the subject matter to technical data sheets. More so, to electronic component data sheets. I.e. for such components as resistors, capacitors integrated circuits, connectors, etc. Commercial electronic component distributors such as DigiKey, Mouser, Arrow, etc. offer 100's of thousands of these for the myriad of components they sell. Most often they are in the form of a viewable or downloadable PDF. These &quot;data sheets&quot; or &quot;specs&quot; list all of the technical particulars of the components such as physical size and electrical characteristics, as well as providing lots of advice on how to use the component in a product you might be designing.</p>
<p>The data sheets are created by the individual manufacturers of the components which are sold by the on-line distributors. Virtually every such component has such a data sheet. These can range in length from a few pages to hundreds of pages.</p>
<p>My question is: are these data sheets protected by US copyright law? Could I, hypothetically, copy 10,000 of these to my own website and offer them to the general public for free? My question is NOT how to go about getting permission from the manufacturers (corporate authors). Rather, my question is do the component manufacturers have any legal ability to prevent and remedy such mass copying?</p>
<p>Knowing full well that such legal questions generally generate a lot of hypothetical, provisional and tentative answers, my further question is has there ever been a specific legal case decided on this specific copyright or IP issue?</p>

<h2>Yes, they are protected by copyright</h2>
<p>They are <a href="https://definitions.uslegal.com/l/literary-works/" rel="noreferrer">literary works</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>According to 17 USCS § 101 &quot;Literary works&quot; are works, other than audiovisual works, expressed in words, numbers, or other verbal or numerical symbols or indicia, regardless of the nature of the material objects, such as books, periodicals, manuscripts, phonorecords, film, tapes, disks, or cards, in which they are embodied.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The copyright owner (in this case the component manufacturer) has the sole right to make or authorize copies (among other rights). Whether the choose to enfore those rights is up to them; they are not obliged to do so.</p>

<p>Yes, they are protected by copyright. A copyright owner can control how the material is copied and disseminated. No, you can't store, copy and disseminate a copyrighted work without the owner's permission. And note that TI does have a copyright notice on its datasheets.
<a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/um8WQ.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/um8WQ.png" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>
<p>As it happens, it is to the advantage of the manufacturer to get the datasheets out to customers. Therefore, TI has this <a href="https://www.ti.com/legal/copyright.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">notice</a> on their web site -</p>
<blockquote>
<p>TI grants permission to download, print copies, store downloaded files on a computer and reference this information in your documents only for your personal and non-commercial use. But remember, TI retains its copyright in all of this information. This means that you may not further display, reproduce, or distribute this information without permission from Texas Instruments. This also means you may not, without our permission, &quot;mirror&quot; this information on your own server, or modify or re-use this information on another system.</p>
<p>TI further grants permission to non-profit, educational institutions
(specifically K-12, universities and community colleges) to download,
reproduce, display and distribute the information on these pages
solely for use in the classroom. This permission is conditioned on not
modifying the information, retaining all copyright notices and
including on all reproduced information the following credit line:
&quot;Courtesy of Texas Instruments&quot;. Please send us a note describing your
use of this information under the permission granted in this
paragraph. Send the note and describe the use according to the request
for permission explained below.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This does not seem to give you the permission you would like to have.</p>

<p>This is not a direct answer to your question <strong>BUT</strong> is relevant enough to be worth conveying as an 'answer', I think :-). [I realise that the answer may be deleted as &quot;not an answer&quot; but I think that it adds usefully to the subject].</p>
<p>I carried out product design and development in China using Chinese and other components.   When looking at data sheets for products such as LEDs I would find likely-unique phrasing in a data sheet and web-search for it. This would often turn up a number of data sheets which could be any of:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>identical except for part numbers</p>
</li>
<li><p>somewhat modified but clearly false technically</p>
</li>
<li><p>somewhat modified and possibly correct technically, and quite often</p>
</li>
<li><p>the original which spawned the tree of others.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>This did not NECESSARILY mean that the product itself was technically flawed, but gave some guidance to the manufacturer's ethos and what to look for in their products.</p>
<p>Worst case, some LED products in no way met claimed specifications despite the manufacturer possessing sophisticated test equipment (seen on site) and allegedly using it to produce specification data.</p>
<p>A key &quot;takeaway&quot; is that the illicit use of copyright datasheets from other manufacturers is a useful guide to what to possibly expect and a demonstration of the usefulness of copyright in this context.</p>
