carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5988 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian
| Message 17 of 37 02 October 2011 at 6:53pm | IP Logged |
Cainntear wrote:
TMoneytron wrote:
but collaborating over something that everyone owns for academic purposes, and not for profit, should be legal. I don't see how anyone could argue against that. |
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You can argue against it quite easily -- because it's illegal.
You are merely twisting the meaning of "academic" to suit yourself. Studying a language at home is not an "academic" pursuit. People seem to assume that all learning is "fair use", but if that was the case, there'd be no commercial market for learning materials. (Which would be a bad thing, because then no-one would be writing them. |
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Are you a copyright lawyer? Methinks not. Using common sense, you'd think that if we all already own the original materials, we should be able to share a translation amongst ourselves, but common sense and the law often don't mix. It sounds like it probably would be illegal because of the distribution, but given the complexity of copyright law it's not so clear-cut, and it's not unreasonable to question the situation.
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TMoneytron Groupie United States Joined 4863 days ago 70 posts - 83 votes Studies: German
| Message 18 of 37 02 October 2011 at 8:16pm | IP Logged |
Completely agreed with carlonove. If you own the material, then you can do whatever you want with it. Short of reproducing it and selling it, or distributing it.
That surely fits the description of "academic," or you could just put it under the "personal use" category. That's how your iPod, iPad, and what have you, works.
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carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5988 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian
| Message 19 of 37 02 October 2011 at 8:40pm | IP Logged |
I didn't say if you own the material you can do whatever you want with it. I said that copyright is complex, and that a seemingly common sense situation is not necessarily a legal one.
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Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6540 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 20 of 37 05 October 2011 at 3:37am | IP Logged |
Could someone anonymously create a blog that had a commentary on each lesson, covering not exactly word for word of the entire lesson, but rather picking out a few sentences. If the commentary was complete, then perhaps a complete translation would be unnecessary. Besides, aren't the translations unnecessary beyond a certain lesson?
Could a thorough commentary really violate copyright law?
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Lasciel Groupie United States Joined 5375 days ago 55 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese
| Message 21 of 37 10 October 2011 at 4:50pm | IP Logged |
Kugel wrote:
Could someone anonymously create a blog that had a commentary on each lesson, covering not exactly word for word of the entire lesson, but rather picking out a few sentences. If the commentary was complete, then perhaps a complete translation would be unnecessary. Besides, aren't the translations unnecessary beyond a certain lesson?
Could a thorough commentary really violate copyright law? |
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Well a commentary would be more like a review/opinion of the lessons, which would be perfectly legal. Heck, some of the language logs on this forum probably do that. As far as quoting sentences from the lessons though... In school I believe they tell us to limit our self to 92 words when quoting something, but it seems like it was a smaller amount for short works (news articles, plays). I'm not sure where language courses would fall in size. How many words does 30 minutes of talking amount to?
I remember my Russian teacher only had a few textbooks, so he took one down to the printer and made a complete paper copy of the whole thing for every single student. Apparently THAT falls under fair use, so... :D I would think students making word lists is the least of language materials businesses' problems.
Edited by Lasciel on 10 October 2011 at 4:54pm
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Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| Message 22 of 37 10 October 2011 at 7:23pm | IP Logged |
Lasciel wrote:
I remember my Russian teacher only had a few textbooks, so he took one down to the printer and made a complete paper copy of the whole thing for every single student. Apparently THAT falls under fair use, so... :D |
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No it doesn't -- teachers are plagiarists by habit.
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Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| Message 23 of 37 10 October 2011 at 7:26pm | IP Logged |
TMoneytron wrote:
Completely agreed with carlonove. If you own the material, then you can do whatever you want with it. Short of reproducing it and selling it, or distributing it. |
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The grey area is that we're talking about a potential "derivative work" that will be reproduced and distributed. Even if I'm allowed to do anything I want with my copy for my purposes, it doesn't mean I can give it to someone else for his purposes.
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That surely fits the description of "academic," or you could just put it under the "personal use" category. That's how your iPod, iPad, and what have you, works. |
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Again, if you share, it's not "personal use".
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Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5567 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin
| Message 24 of 37 10 October 2011 at 10:20pm | IP Logged |
Under UK law, translating and distributing to the public an Assimil dialogue without Assimil's consent (even
on a restricted access website) would be an adaptation and thus a copyright infringement (ss.18 and 21
Copyright Act 1988) The fact that it would be free and only to people who owned a work would be
irrelevant - it would still be an unlawful infringement. I even think making wordlists would be an
infringement on the basis that there is an adaptation and distribution of 'a substantial part' of the
copyrighted work.
Edited by Elexi on 10 October 2011 at 10:22pm
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