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FSI - some news | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| htdavidht Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4416 days ago 68 posts - 121 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French | Message 1 of 44 04 March 2013 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I contacted the hosting company on the hopes that the problem was delay on payments so I can maybe do a payment and have the website back enough time for us to make a copy.
The problem is not payments. They didn't told me what the problem was, but it seams it is not as simple as I though. My guess is that maybe some of the material was not really open domain and someone actually have copyrights on it, I made this assumption on the bases that there is a website selling the FSI courses for 100 dollars. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Tanizaki Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4593 days ago 21 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese | Message 2 of 44 04 March 2013 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I am familiar with that website. The fact that they sell the courses does not mean that they hold the copyright to the US government materials. It simply means they are repackaging public domain materials. I am allowed to sell copies of Moby-Dick if I want even though I do not hold the copyright. BTW, that site usually sells the courses for $20 with the warning of "we are going back to $99 tomorrow, promise!" I am a lawyer, and in my experience, if there is infringing material being hosted, that material is taken down after a lawyer sends the site a nasty letter. It doesn't explain why the entire site is offline. In any event, some members of this forum have recovered the site's materials. I have an archive on my home computer as well. But, I am curious to know what is really going on here. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| HenryMW Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4967 days ago 125 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, French Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 3 of 44 04 March 2013 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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You can sell something that is in the public domain, you just can't prevent other people
from making copies and selling it as well. Edit: Tanizaki beat me to the punch. Edited by HenryMW on 04 March 2013 at 6:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7014 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 4 of 44 04 March 2013 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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@htdavidht, I remember seeing the presumed site in question many years ago. Your presumption about this site having copyright to all the FSI programs in general I believe is in error. Like what has already been mentioned it repackages the FSI programs and sells it to the public for a profit. If I recall before the free FSI site had some members make sure everything was in the up and up and no violations would take place. I think one member even contacted the government about this and I remember reading about it is alright to distribute the programs, as long as it is unaltered. If the site, that claims to have the copyright to all FSI programs (especially unaltered versions), then they should be able to prove it. The government should be contacted and refer the site in question. Surely, the questioned website would have no qualms in providing the information, to be the only sellers of the programs. The questioned site would be able to prohibit other sellers such as: multilingual books, Audio Forum, Barron's and so on. The questioned website should be able to monopolize the FSI programs and can be bought only from them. I am curious to see the results, as it is getting the government and tax payers involved in the situation. I also remember reading a post about the companies, that repackaged the FSI programs and sell them are probably circling the free FSI website, like sharks looking for ways to stop it. In my honest opinion this is probably what is happening, if the site in question or any company makes the claims of having exclusive copyright on the FSI programs. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4682 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 5 of 44 04 March 2013 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
The site is a bit amateurish - for a lot of the courses they don't even list how many hours of recordings or pages of print there are. Nor do they give you any previews so that you can compare their audio quality to the original's. Twenty bucks would be a bargain for one of the huge courses like French or Spanish, especially if the recordings were crisper and the books cleaned up. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6390 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 44 04 March 2013 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| htdavidht Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4416 days ago 68 posts - 121 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French | Message 7 of 44 04 March 2013 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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OK, I call the company, hostgator.com, they have a phone number on their website.
Usually hosting companies take everybody money, they don't care if the account number is on the same name of the owner of the website or so. I have done this kind of things before, that is pay for a website that I don't own. The person I talked to told me the problem is not money, can't tell me what the problem is, and in order for me to do something to fix it I need to verify that I own or have owners access to the website. They will not tell me more about this, they will not give me a backup copy of the website and so on. I want to make clear this: the error message you see on the fsi website is put in place by hostgator company, they can take it out and put up the actual website back up anytime they want to. I don't know for how long they let the error message up before taking it down for good, each company have different policies about this. Maybe a lawyer can contact the hostgator company and see if in consideration that it is public domain information on the website they can explain what is the problem, or something. The thing is if it is a DMCA claim (the copyrights) then a counterclaim need to be fill, if the info belong to us all, then I guess anybody can do the counter, but I am just guessing because I have not idea what the actual problem is and how to fix it... I though it maybe was money and I try my shot. I get the impression the problem is more than money. I am not rich, but ones in a while I can spend 10 dollars for a good cause. I think it totally worth the effort to get the fsi website back, and someone with more knowledge than me need to step up and try a shot at this. It all takes a phone call. Now answering some questions/objections: "I am a lawyer, and in my experience, if there is infringing material being hosted, that material is taken down after a lawyer sends the site a nasty letter. It doesn't explain why the entire site is offline." After you send the nasty letter to the webmaster you give some time to action, then probably you contact the hosting company sending them a more nasty letter and they don't care to browse what page have the claimed faulty material, they will take down the whole site. Please consider that running a whois on the fsi website give as only contact the hosting company, hostgator, (this by itself maybe an infringement on web hosting rules) So more sooner than latter the hosting company got the nasty letter you are talking about... is a possible option of what happened. "I also remember reading a post about the companies, that repackaged the FSI programs and sell them are probably circling the free FSI website, like sharks looking for ways to stop it. In my honest opinion this is probably what is happening, if the site in question or any company makes the claims of having exclusive copyright on the FSI programs." Very valid theory, we can't prove nothing about it yet, it does bug me that the website selling the material display a government seal on their art work and the company behind it (Plurality Language) is questionable reputation, as some internet gossip shows... the government seal makes it look official. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4923 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 8 of 44 04 March 2013 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Of course not. You're not the registrant, admin or tech contact for that domain name. It would be silly to provide a site backup to anyone else.
Just because something is in the public domain, there's no obligation for the hosting company to give any explanation.
Getting ahead of yourself. We don't know the reason why. Why speculate?
It seems we have a couple HTLAL members working to do that now. It won't have the fsi- language-courses.org/ domain name, but the contents will all be there.
Again, getting ahead of yourself. We don't know what happened, and besides, "nasty letters" rarely if ever help in this type of situation. R. == 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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