hi I'm Kyle with iFixit and over the
weekend I learned something that upset
me I have a friend in Australia his name
is Tim he runs a website called Tim's
laptop service manuals and for years
he's been posting PDF service manuals
that he gets from his friends that have
connections with manufacturers and he's
been one of the best online resources
sharing how to fix all kinds of laptops
including a lot of products that I fix
it doesn't have manuals for Tim got a
really nasty letter from Toshiba's
lawyers the other day demanding that he
remove every single Toshiba service
manual he out on his site it turns out
they've decided they don't want him
helping service techs do their jobs as a
matter of fact they don't want anybody
to know how to fix toshiba's products
that isn't authorized by them so they
demanded Tim remove over 300 Toshiba
service manuals from his site so here's
what I want to do I would like to
replace every single manual that Toshiba
made Tim take off his website with a new
manual that's free open-source and
better than the Toshiba manuals here's
what we need from you
we need hardware to write those manuals
so if you have an old Toshiba laptop you
can send it in to us and we'll write a
manual for it if you don't have an old
Toshiba laptop we're raising money over
on IndieGoGo every single dollar people
give us we're going to take and go on
eBay buy old Toshiba laptops write
repair manuals for those and then three
if you're a service tech and you want to
pitch in we'd love to send you a laptop
and have you help us write manuals this
is a big challenge Tim have a lot of
really quality service information on
his site and it's gonna be a lot of work
to replace it but it's critical for all
of us that we do it I'm confident we can
we just need a little bit of your help
if you want to contribute head over the
indiegogo.com slash - Sheba and let's
get all the hardware that we need to
replace all the information Toshiba took
offline repair manuals are really
important Apple has been using legal
techniques to keep their manuals offline
for years and Toshiba joining them is
the last thing we need this is what I
fix it's been fighting for four years we
need to make a free and open-source
repair manual for everything in the
world so all of us know how to fix our
things join us and let's open Toshiba's
products