Yes they are, but pirating service manuals is a bit different.  The
manufacturer
has already gotten paid for the R&D that went into creating the manual by
selling the device the manual covers.  Unless that is, there's been a change
in
accounting laws and it's now acceptable to remove R&D costs from the
item the R&D was done for, and apply them to service documentation.

And we would see a lot less piracy from those Pacific Rim countries if our
own manufacturers quit outsourcing production to the Pacific Rim.  The
real truth is that companies here save millions by handing over all the
instructions
to build their products to manufacturers in China - then scream about losing
millions when at the end of the day when those manufacturers have completed
all their production runs for the company here and simply continue running
the
same assembly line for another 8 hours and churn out another pile of devices
for the counterfiters.  In the meantime, all the people who were working on
those lines here are out of a job and collecting welfare here, and the CEO's
of
those same companies here are collecting golden parachutes and windfall
bonuses for all the money they saved by outsourcing.

Economists say how great it is to outsource because then prices for our
consumers here drop - what good is that when the people who would
enjoy those lower prices can't do so because they have no job to do anymore
that pays them anything.

Ted