I run iFixit. We started writing our own repair manuals because of this very issue way back in 2003. Slashdot has run stories about us on a number of occasions.
Apple has been very aggressively protecting their copyright on service manuals pretty much since the dawn of the internet. Heres an example of them going after Something Awful. Many of the sites theyve gone after have ceased to exist.
Since then, with the help of tens of thousands of incredible repair technicians around the world (including many redditors), we have built the largest free repair manual. Because we write them ourselves, the manufacturers cant shut us down. The community has written over 6,000 manuals, and you can download and reproduce any of them to your hearts content. We even post all of our manuals on bittorrent and the internet archive so they are guaranteed to be free forever.
Heres our Toshiba laptop service manual. Weve made progress on half a dozen laptops so far, with more on the way. Not nearly as comprehensive as what timix had, but its a start.
Toshiba is not an outlier here--they represent the status quo. Many manufacturers havent gotten around to issuing these C&D letters, but its perfectly within their right. Any site hosting manufacturer service manuals without permission is at risk of a shutdown like this at any time.
Thats why what we do at iFixit is so important. The world needs to know how to fix these products. Repair is critical for the environment. Repair helps bridge the digital divide by keeping the secondhand electronics market alive. And electronics repair represents hundreds of thousands of jobs in the United States alone.
We cannot rely on the good will of manufacturers. Yes, many of them have looked the other way and ignored sites like timixs, but that is unlikely to continue. We have three options:
Its easy to say, "shame on Toshiba" and move on with your life. But this is not unique to Toshiba. No cell phone manufacturer makes their service manuals available. In fact, outside of the heavy equipment industry (where customers demand it) and the automotive industry (where legislation requires it), its the rare manufacturer that does not use copyright to prevent publication of their service manuals.
I wrote the Self Repair Manifesto to make the voice of the consumer known. Its time for us to stand up for ourselves. We have the right to repair our things, and to the information required to do it.
We are making some progress. The forthcoming green cell phone standard, UL 110, gives manufacturers environmental points for providing open source service manuals. That gain is tenuous and could be reversed at any time, but its a foothold.
Ive dedicated my life to making this information available, and we cant do it alone. We need to band together as a community and take a stand.
We would love help. Join us over at iFixit! Or, if you want to get involved with advocacy work, email me at kyle at ifixit and Ill point you in the right direction.
I started iFixit, and I wrote today's teardown. I'm also a long-time
I totally dig the anti-Microsoft sentiment. But just like with the iPad, we've got real innovation here that came out of a closed environment. Microsoft's got hundreds of millions of dollars invested in visual motion recognition and speech recognition technology. The best reaction all of us in the open source community can have is to use this innovation as a call to action, and as building a block to write open tools. Adafruit's contest is a fantastic start, and I'll be supporting that any way I can.
Got any questions about the hardware that I didn't address in the teardown? Fire away.
Kyle Wiens
We welcome anything on iFixit that enables repair. We define repair as anything that makes something work longer. Useful upgrades certainly fall into that category, and we'd love your contributions!
AC, you're right, Youtube is useful-- but it's not a replacement for a service manual. It would be much better to have one, trusted place to go to learn how to work on something than to search through videos. The other side of this is that this information needs to be easy enough that your mom can follow it. Mumbling videos don't always inspire confidence.
Never invest your money in anything that eats or needs repainting. -- Billy Rose