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Thank you + idea

PostPosted: April 24th, 2010, 12:00 pm
by Boing
Thank you very very very much!

I am not american and my native language is not English but this site is still very useful for me :-)

And now to my idea, why don't you save server traffic share all the data as language packages on Bittorrent? It's free, fast and you would save a lot of traffic an money. It has been invented to spread Linux on low costs.
So my suggestion would be to put all courses of a language in a Folder, then zip it and then sharing it on Bittorrent (e.g. spanish.zip, german.zip etc)

Re: Thank you + idea

PostPosted: April 24th, 2010, 9:00 pm
by Oberon
I think this has been discussed before. As I understand it, one of the problems is that while the courses are in the public domain in the United States, they may not be in the public domain in other countries. Users of BitTorrent are simultaneously downloading and uploading. If the user is located in a country where the files are still copyrighted, they would be technically committing a copyright violation by uploading. By providing the US created files from a US server such as is done here, the problem is avoided.

Re: Thank you + idea

PostPosted: April 27th, 2010, 8:01 am
by chung
That makes sense, Oberon. Thanks for pointing that out.

People definitely forget that the public-domain status of FSI courses (and even then only those of a certain age) is not uniform across countries but the lazy person's way is to extrapolate the USA's laws on public-domain materials to the rest of the world (perhaps this is a form of "legalistic imperialism"? ;))

I hope that this also settles down those people who constantly wonder or even snidely think that the administration here is unnecessarily old-fashioned / strict because of the refusal to use or endorse torrents. There were similar threads at fsi-language-courses.com where people were also venting a bit over why gdfellows (i.e. the administrator) was against P2P or torrents.

Re: Thank you + idea

PostPosted: April 27th, 2010, 1:00 pm
by rbos
Interesting. I had thought that the Berne Convention applied to the USA in that the originating country's copyright expiration would apply in all countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... orter_term

Apparently, the USA doesn't accept this doctrine, and you can end up with situations in which something is copyrighted outside the USA but not inside it.