Nikon thinks I’m going to steal its owners manuals!

Nikon is paranoid that I might be an evil bad nasty pirate who will print an illegal copy of its Coolpix L18 owners’ manual, and presumably do something nefarious with it.

I own a blue Nikon Coolpix L18 (my wife has a matching red one). It’s a great camera, and lives in my briefcase most of the time. I wanted to look up something in the manual, so rather than look for the hard copy (buried at home somewhere), I went to the Nikon website to download it digitally.

The manual download page was easy to find, and here’s what it says:

To protect against Copyright Infringement, Nikon offers two versions of our current product manuals. A fully printable manual for existing owners (which requires a valid, North American, Nikon camera serial number and registration to download) and a non-printable version for others (no serial number required). If you need an account, click here.

Naturally, I downloaded the non-printable version. I didn’t feel like registering with Nikon and setting up an “account” with them, just to look up something in the owner’s manual.

Isn’t this ridiculous?

>> Update: Nikon’s lawyers may be paranoid, but they’re also incompetent. The non-printable version of the owner’s manual is ‘secured’ by a simple password against printing; it’s easy to circumvent this protection. The PDF file is also not locked against copy/paste! It would take less time to create a printable version of the manual than it would be to register for the printable version. Idiots.