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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 9 of 44 04 March 2013 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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In addition to PluralityLanguage.com's use of the State Department's seal (notwithstanding its rather flimsy argument that not doing so would be false advertising - yeah, sure. It's a nice try in duping visitors into thinking that the site is part of the federal government regardless of the legal disclaimer), there's also a certain similarity (mimicry?) in the layout by PluralityLanguage.com compared to Pimsleur's kits (as I've noted here)
Compare FSI Hungarian Basic from foreignserviceinstitute.com/PluralityLanguage.com 
...with Pimsleur Hungarian Comprehensive 
4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4888 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 10 of 44 04 March 2013 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wasn't the FSI site originally built by HTLAL members? If we could track them down we
might get insight into who the owners / admins are for the site. Edited by kanewai on 04 March 2013 at 11:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7143 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 11 of 44 04 March 2013 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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The original site was created by forum member gdfellows, who hasn't visited the HTLAL forum since late 2007. After it was created, it went down a couple of times; per my recollection as gdfellows' work commitments made it tougher for him to devote the time needed to manage it, an active contributor to that site, VagabondPilgrim, got nervious about the possibility of the site's going down permanently (which it eventually did) and independently took it upon himself to try to create a separate backup site, much as Ericounet is doing now. (VagabondPilgrim, although a member of HTLAL for some time, has only left one message to date on the forum, following his site's outage late last year.)
Various other people contributed materials to the two sites, and there was a fair amount of interaction on legal issues, availability of materials, etc., on the forums that both sites had, but as far as I can recall (and I had been somewhat involved with both sites in terms of contributing some materials, commenting in the forums, and corresponding with the owners), these were the only two people involved in the sites. My impression has always been that both sites were independent of each other, and that there was essentially no collaboration between gdfellows and VagabondPilgrim. I've read the above speculations re the possible background to the outage with interest, but it seems to me that we really have no basis on which to draw any conclusions. I would like to think that VagabondPilgrim will get the site up and running again, and I pray that nothing has happened to him, but since the site has been down for quite a while now and he hasn't surfaced the way he did last time to advise that it would be back up, I'm getting pessimistic. In any event, both of these guys, by creating the sites, provided a tremendous service to language-learners, and both did it on their own time and completely out of their own resources. When people offered to chip in to help pay for hosting costs et al, they both declined, and neither ever sought to make money from the sites. So personally I'm very grateful to both of them. Ericounet seems to be following in the same path and with the same selfless approach, and likewise deserves our thanks and support. It's also encouraging to see that so many others are committing to backup and keep the materials available in various ways, showing once again the synergistic impact of this forum -- which, as kanewai notes, was what led to the original fsi courses site being created in the first place. Edited by daristani on 04 March 2013 at 11:31pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5374 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 12 of 44 05 March 2013 at 1:39am | IP Logged | ||
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If the public material was improved by for profit vendors and the improved versions (of audio quality or audio prompts, for example) were posted on the site, the for profit vendors would have a property interest in the material. I recall that quite a while ago unit III of Basic Spanish sounded awful and unit IV was not on the site (but was advertised by vendors). Now unit III sounds good and unit IV is there. That sort of thing could be a problem for the site. By the way, there were updates to the site not that long ago... certainly within the last year or so.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5446 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 13 of 44 06 March 2013 at 12:53am | IP Logged | ||
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If I improve upon an out of copyright work by, eg, writing a new introduction, I can lay claim to the introduction but no one is precluded from republishing the actual work, just my introduction. Likewise, if an original recording is public domain someone may clean it up and sell it and hold rights to the cleaned up version. But this doesn't preclude someone else from also cleaning up the original for distribution. In short, were there a legitimate DMCA takedown notice it could be satisfied, as mentioned above, by taking down the offending content.
For my own part, one of my websites has gone down more than once for exceeding the allotted bandwidth. Amid all the more sinister speculations, there's the perfectly plausible possibility that a person or even a spider went nuts downloading and the site is in limbo while the owners decide whether to negotiate a contract with more bandwidth, leave the site idle until the next billing cycle or find a new host, depending on the arrangement with the current hosts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5297 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 14 of 44 06 March 2013 at 1:46am | IP Logged | ||
Now as you mention it i can as well add what I had wanted to say for quite a while but for some reason never did: Let's be very careful when downloading material from such private low bandwidth sites. Starting a spider grabber super download software with aggressive settings can very well be equivalent to an attack, or at least lead to the same consequences. In most cases one may not need the course for one's potential 35th language while struggling to find a foothold in the second one... We can download one by one over a longer period of time and help keeping the sites alive. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| htdavidht Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4622 days ago 68 posts - 121 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French | Message 15 of 44 06 March 2013 at 6:41am | IP Logged | ||
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I found this line in another website:
"12/19/2012 Jim This site is down. An FSI employee (that is, a State Dept employee) advises that their sub-department objected to the use of "fsi" in the site name. But she doesn't know where an "ordinary" U.S. resident (me for instance) can obtain the public domains materials used by FSI to teach foreign languages to employees in the Foreign Service. I have been promoting the site for years." http://www.educational-freeware.com/online/fsi-languages.asp x 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 16 of 44 06 March 2013 at 7:40am | IP Logged | ||
That's somewhat funny logic since we have Plurality Language running foreignserviceinstitute.com (yes, it's not .gov, but using the State Department's seal and FSI coat of arms in addition to the name in the URL seems more than a little suggestive, but still it somehow doesn't bother an employee at FSI enough to complain about a a private company that's reselling courses and keeping the proceeds for itself. Hmmmmm....) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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