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 FSI Language Courses Forum : Learning Languages : General Discussion
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Harry Wood
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Quote Harry Wood Replybullet Topic: Copyright / license information is unclear
    Posted: 03 August 2007 at 10:28am
The copyright / license information is unclear on this site. It should be clarified, not just in this discussion, but on the main site (perhaps on the 'about' page)

The home page says "These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain."

But at the bottom of every page there is the copyright notice "©2006-2007 Glen D. Fellows - All rights reserved."

Information which the government releases into the public domain, can be scanned, and the digitised work placed under copyright (in many/most jurisdictions) ...but is that the intention here? Or should the copyright only apply to the website design?

It's obvious that you are serving out these downloads for 'free' as in 'without cost', but is this 'free content' (still in the public domain)? Gratis versus Libre

This is a decision for whoever runs this site (Glen D. Fellows?) but it's also something which probably should have been established as part of the undertanding of people contributing to the site.

Are the contributors happy to grant permission, or freedom to everyone, to use the PDF/MP3 content for any purpose, copy it, modify it, and to redistribute modified versions ? For example, would the contributors be happy for me to take extracts and rework the texts and upload my derived work onto the languages sections of wikibooks.org?

The US government doesn't care. They released the texts to the public domain, but if I download a PDF from here, is it still public domain?

Closest thing I found to answering this question was
this old post, but that same discussion also has some comments which suggest that people dont really follow the 'free content' way of thinking.
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DemiPuppet
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Quote DemiPuppet Replybullet Posted: 07 August 2007 at 10:11pm
Copyright doesn't apply to these PDF books since they are scanned reproductions of public-domain material.  They can be used freely with Wikipedia,  though this varies from country to country:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_PD-Art_tag#Country-specific_rules


The audio files are a little more problematic.  I've attempted to be as faithful to the works as possible; so much so that  I've even submitted them as uncompressed lossless WAV files. As a "slavish copy" these do not have US copyright (Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel).

But, the audio files presented on the site probably have a very thin copyright.  GDF took the raw files I provided, split them into units, and added MP3 tag text.  The compilation decisions and MP3 text are covered by copyright.  You'll need to talk directly to him about that.

Also, the "hard work" performed to digitize the text does not grant copyright in the US. But this may not apply to other countries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

Anecdotally, onebir once mentioned a case in the UK where a shop owner was selling a copy of another reseller's scanned FSI works (Audio Forum?).  Apparently the owner was sued for copyright infringement and had to pay damages...



Edited by DemiPuppet - 07 August 2007 at 10:34pm
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