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Websites with original FSI material

Printed From: FSI Language Courses
Category: Learning Languages
Forum Name: General Discussion
Forum Discription: Discussion about studying languages using the FSI courses. If you would like to see a specific language forum not listed below, just let us know.
URL: http://fsi-language-courses.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=261
Printed Date: 16 January 2009 at 3:23am


Topic: Websites with original FSI material
Posted By: lucvileyn
Subject: Websites with original FSI material
Date Posted: 06 January 2007 at 8:47am
Does anyone have a list of websites with original FSI material that you can buy online (eventually by download)? Would be interesting. If I buy something, the site administrator could download it directly from my own (private) ftp-server and post it on the site.

I can also digitize material (on the mac, toast titanium suite 7 is a good tool) for that purpose. I would like to see some stuff from standard Chinese rescanned/digitised. One of my friends has Adobe Acrobat I could use for scanning.

i.e. is this copyprotected stuff?

http://www.multilingualbooks.com/fsi.html



Replies:
Posted By: Chung
Date Posted: 06 January 2007 at 10:06am

I don't know if the downloads from http://www.multilingualbooks.com - www.multilingualbooks.com have copy-protection, but none of their stuff is eligible for posting here anyway because of the copyright imposed by Multilingual Books Inc.

The list of original FSI stuff so far consists of one:
http://www.ntis.org - http://www.ntis.org  (and there's no option for downloading.)
 
As far as I can tell, the only sites that offer downloading of FSI courses other than this one, are private companies such as Multilingual Books and Language Associates (from tradebit.com). There may be other sites that allow you to download a FSI course for a fee, but those courses are from private sites as well and thus ineligible for posting on this site.
 
You can get lucky and find original stuff on eBay or garage sales, but that doesn't happen very often.


Posted By: DemiPuppet
Date Posted: 06 January 2007 at 10:16am
Short answer: Maybe

The text is in the public domain in the US. But, since these books are photo-reproductions, there may be a copyright claim that the "photo" is copyrighted.

The safest way to handle non-original FSI material would be to OCR the text. Do not photo-copy and publish the photo-copy.

There has been some court cases in the US that indicate a "slavish" photocopy of a public domain object is not copyright-able.  Other countries, such as the UK, apparently are more willing to support copyrights of photo-copies. For additional reading see:

http://www.ninch.org/copyright/2000/sfbutler.html - http://www.ninch.org/copyright/2000/sfbutler.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_Ltd._v._Corel_Corporation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_Ltd._v._Corel_Corporation


Posted By: lucvileyn
Date Posted: 06 January 2007 at 3:29pm
Well, that's the problem. It is almost impossible to ocr pinyin texts (http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/PINYIN/pinyin.htm). I tried OCR applicatons, some of the best, and not even one supports pinyin. I even tried to create a new language profile, but some characters are simply refused. Someone has a better idea? You're welcome.



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