Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6009 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| Message 25 of 34 06 April 2010 at 12:22pm | IP Logged |
cordelia0507 wrote:
Please can people not support this great project without worrying about copyright and nonsense? What has that got to do with anything? The site isn't even using ads at the time; it's clearly an enthusiast project right now. Don't abuse it, but don't run the errands of big business either. Knowledge is power, power to the people. Why would you even want to put copyrighted material on it - I am sure most people know where to go for that. |
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cordelia0507 wrote:
Please can people not support this great project without worrying about copyright and nonsense? |
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Uncritical support is no support at all, because without useful feedback (and even harsh criticism can be useful), there is no impetus for improvement.
There are many thousands of projects on the internet that never live up to their potential because when people make a simple suggestion they are cut down for "criticising" someone who's trying to do something useful.
When you talk about people not "running the errands of big business", I'm assuming you're referring to people like myself who say not to put copyright-infringing material up. Well put it this way -- copyright infringement could kill Rhinospike. Why? Well even though Rhinospike should be protected by Safe Harbor legislation, Peter will still have to respond to DMCA takedown notices. If the site takes off, the volume of takedown notices could potentially become too high for him to respond in the legally mandated timeframe, in which case his only option to prevent prosecution is to take the site offline until he has cleared the backlog.
Rhinospike is particularly vulnerable to copyright policing because each sound file by nature is written out in plain text, so can be discovered easily using nothing more specialist than Google.
So standing up against infringing materials isn't "running the errands of big business", it's protecting the site.
Now, back to analysis of the weaknesses of the site itself:
Bandwidth is expensive. Admin here can't cover his costs out of adverts and subscriptions/donations and he's serving text and a few images that are mostly cached locally on users' PCs for repeat viewing. What he doesn't have is a library of sound files.
Rhinospike is all about audio. In a few minutes checking out the site I probably downloaded a couple of megabytes. As the site grows with more users and more soundfiles, it will become very expensive to maintain. Where's the money coming from for that?
Anyone who submits or fulfills requests on the site is investing their time into the project, so I think it's fair to ask what is put in place to ensure continuity of service, so that our work won't be lost.
4 persons have voted this message useful
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balazsbotond Diglot Newbie Hungary Joined 6241 days ago 5 posts - 9 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English Studies: German, Spanish
| Message 26 of 34 08 April 2010 at 3:07pm | IP Logged |
I've just registered so now you can request audio in Hungarian too. I'll do my best to record everything as soon as I can.
1 person has voted this message useful
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Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5446 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin
| Message 27 of 34 08 April 2010 at 9:22pm | IP Logged |
Absolutely great project, I've registered couple of days ago. I've already done some
Serbian recordings (and then got a new mic, because I wasn't too happy with the quality
:) ).
One suggestion, I don't know how hard it would be to do it (or how necessary :D, but just
a thought) - can there be an option that people cant tick when they are submitting a
request, if they want a recording to be in slow speed (as opposite to natural speech,
which could be a default option, for example)? I can imagine some beginner learners
wanting their recordings in slower speech...(of course, the easiest way to do this is if
people just say in their requests that they want a slow speed :) )
1 person has voted this message useful
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onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7161 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin
| Message 28 of 34 21 May 2010 at 11:27am | IP Logged |
Equally useful would be a "Reverse Rhinospike" where people can submit transcriptions of existing audio or video materials. Wiki-type facilities for cooperating on these would allow non-native speaker learners to do this for any materials they found interesting. (This would reduce the problems of user language-imbalance raised above.)
Re copyright:
a) copyright holders are unlikely to have the energy to chase fragments of their material when intact versions are often available elsewhere.
b) 'fair use' provisions could well cover what Rhinospike is doing, which should discourage action.
1 person has voted this message useful
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crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5816 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French
| Message 29 of 34 01 May 2011 at 9:03pm | IP Logged |
I just found this website so I thought I'd bump the thread on it to get it some more
attention.
Looks pretty cool so far. It'd be great if they could get more non-English speakers to
participate but the numbers are pretty impressive already.
2 persons have voted this message useful
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Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German
| Message 30 of 34 01 May 2011 at 9:50pm | IP Logged |
Glad this thread got bumped, I didn't see it the first time around.
So, here's a little question: Where are people getting the texts they submit to get recorded. Seeing as you can't
upload copyrighted material, that rules out books (including language textbooks), articles, websites and … almost
everything written by someone you don't know. So is it texts taken from public domain sources (which are scarce),
text written by the learners themselves (which will contain mistakes) or copyrighted texts that are low-key enough
that you hope nobody will notice or care?
1 person has voted this message useful
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peterjcarroll Newbie United States rhinospike.com Joined 5352 days ago 4 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Ancient Greek
| Message 31 of 34 01 May 2011 at 11:45pm | IP Logged |
Since Creative Commons texts are allowed, many people use Wikipedia articles for source text. Many also have their own text corrected at somewhere like lang-8.com first, and then submit the corrected version of their text to be recorded. There are also many public domain language learning books out there which are legal to use. (http://sites.google.com/site/soyouwanttolearnalanguage/lang uagee-books has some listed there)
Ari wrote:
Glad this thread got bumped, I didn't see it the first time around.
So, here's a little question: Where are people getting the texts they submit to get recorded. Seeing as you can't
upload copyrighted material, that rules out books (including language textbooks), articles, websites and … almost
everything written by someone you don't know. So is it texts taken from public domain sources (which are scarce),
text written by the learners themselves (which will contain mistakes) or copyrighted texts that are low-key enough
that you hope nobody will notice or care? |
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3 persons have voted this message useful
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Registrador Tetraglot Newbie Czech Republic Joined 5024 days ago 16 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Spanish*, French, English, Italian Studies: German, Czech
| Message 32 of 34 18 May 2012 at 10:29am | IP Logged |
Is someone using rhinospike in 2012? How is it? Is it worthy?
1 person has voted this message useful
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