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julowe
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Quote julowe Replybullet Topic: Farsi/Persian and copyright issues?
    Posted: 10 October 2007 at 8:07am
So I stumbled upon this site today and was excited to see how many courses are available. And i noticed that the Farsi/Persian Fast course I have is not included in the list...

But I do have a questions about copyrights etc. I search through the forum and saw Poetry's extensive research on the topic but it seems like there isn't much of a consensus, or at least not form what I saw. So I'm wondering - would it be legal for me to scan in my course and upload it?

And complicating that questions is the fact I can't find it right now so I can't be too helpful and give the date or anything else like that... so I guess I am just asking a general question (for now).

And also - would anybody be interested in it in the first place?
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skol
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Quote skol Replybullet Posted: 10 October 2007 at 10:17pm
I'd certainly like it :D
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DemiPuppet
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Quote DemiPuppet Replybullet Posted: 10 October 2007 at 10:33pm
It would be only legal (not a copyright violation) if it is in the US public domain.
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julowe
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Quote julowe Replybullet Posted: 11 October 2007 at 8:06am
So (and I am at a bit of a loss as I still haven't found the course) how do i tell if it is in the public domain? I mean will it say in the course somewhere "feel free to spread this over the internets (sic) b/c it is in the public domain"? or is it a - government works are in the poublic domain after X number of years kind of thing? (and what is X then?) or are there other overlapping rules that are known?
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Chung
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Quote Chung Replybullet Posted: 11 October 2007 at 4:50pm
To be 100% certain, you'd need to check with the US Copyright Office or creators of the course. As Poetry found out, sometimes not even the government has a complete list of the copyrighted material/excerpts it has used in otherwise public-domain material.
 
Some of the notices about copyright or distribution that we have seen in DLI courses are a bit vague, while FSI courses usually have nothing explicit about their materials being the public domain. We're left to figure things out indirectly.
 
For old FSI courses, because the books state they are printed by the Government Printing Office and mention the authors as being part of the Foreign Service Institute (ultimately part of the State Department), we're inferring that they're in the public domain.
 
We've never had an intellectual-property lawyer or a government agency confirm that we are truly in the clear, thus there is a very small chance that what we're doing isn't legal after all. So far no one has challenged it and imposed a shutdown order on gdfellows and this site's traffic has been increasing as more and more people have been finding out about it over the last year.
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