It may be just the way my feed is set up, but I have been seeing an increase of public material that I’m fairly sure is under copyright and ought not to be public. For instance, I have seen entire Harry Potter books shared publicly in several languages; surely, LingQ does not have a license to publish these for free?
It seems like a very dangerous trend that could endanger LingQ’s existence if copyright holders started to sue!
I’ve noticed that, too. Several books of Harry Potter.
Why do you think they are publisched for free? We paid money for LingQ, so maybe this questions are solved.
By the way, what language are you talking about? I saw Harry Potter in German
It’s funny that you mention Harry Potter series specifically. From what i’ve read the copyright for translations of different books have been sold to various parties and not entirely controlled by JK Rowling anymore.
Where it gets interesting is what is available for free. If you google the first chapter of the first book you will find multiple long standing sources, mixed among them is sources with the entire book and other sources with pdf / epub copies of the entire series. It’s like Google and the copyright holders don’t even care or aren’t in a position to do anything about it. Being said it’s probably not worth the risk, just mark them external and slap the link to the Google promoted source with the epub.
Thanks for the idea actually, time to add a copyright free book query and import feature to the importer
Of course it could be the case that this is all licenced … or not.
Just to be clear, it doesn’t matter if you “found” something online that it was free, so you thought it was free. The law doesn’t care what you thought (at least not for common people).
You are always responsible from the material that you share online under your own name. You always need to check if the material that you are sharing is copyright free, or creative commons, and which type of license, and how much you can share, and so on.
Even further, if you share copyrighted material on LingQ, you risk to damage the platform, and this doesn’t help anybody.
For this reason, if you think any material is copyrighted, you should report it by using the relative report button on each course or lesson, and the team will figure it out.
No, this is not a good idea. Often those platforms are scam, they ask you to register, credit card, then never deliver anything and steal your money.
Plus, if you promote something that could potentially being illegal, you are liable for that too. As you said, I wouldn’t risk it.
EDIT: you need to be sure you add some research/tool that will legally protect you by searching material that are legally copyright free, or open source. I don’t know how to do it to avoid bumping into scam sites, or similar.
They are user-uploaded. If LingQ had a license to publish them, they would upload the books themselves (and, as was said in a previous answer, they would advertise the heck out of such an expensive addition to their product).
So, here’s the thing: I am not actually personally in legal peril for using what’s been uploaded by others. My country’s laws actually allow me to interact with copyrighted materials I find online and even to download them for personal use (whether this is good law is a separate matter…). Other countries very well may have different laws that leave even you, the “mere” user, on the hook…
But LingQ is in legal peril. It is in nobody’s interest for LingQ to be destroyed in copyright disputes and taken down, or go bankrupt due to litigation and penalties. That way we all lose a huge value. I really want LingQ (and the community) to avoid that!
Copyrighted content shouldn’t be shared. Our content managers are keeping track of the library constantly and if they believe content should be removed, they will do so.
What about working with the Copyright Clearance Center, to make it easier to use copyrighted materials on Lingq?
Perhaps we could find a way to license some graded readers, so that users could easily click through and pay the copyright royalties.
Looks interesting. One concern I have is whether this would also capture privately uploaded lessons, which could endanger LingQ’s concept from another direction. I don’t know the law in every part of the world, but in my country I am perfectly within my rights to use copyrighted material as long as I don’t share it with others who haven’t paid for it.
There is no problem with uploading copyrighted material, as long as it is kept private to the person who uploaded it.
Do not share or make publicly available, copyrighted material.
Right. The question is whether an automated solution can be made to recognize the difference.
They could add a button to notify admin if something appears to be copyrighted. I remember back in the day YouTube was full of copyrighted content. So much that you wouldn’t think the platform could exist without it. But the legal system made them clean it up. Of course, Google has a lot more resources than LingQ and was able to make an AI do most of the legwork. I don’t think that’s an option for a little company like LingQ but maybe I’m wrong. I would think it would be up to users to report it.
Right now we manually address copyright claims and are likely to keep doing so in the near future.
As kraemder mentioned, Google has more resources than we do and can implement some sort of automated alternative. Keep in mind that a nonzero portion of language-learning content is shared here with the permission of the owner, sometimes because they themselves were users and sometimes because our users reached out to them and ask for permission.
Unless it’s Disney, from what I’ve seen, Youtube doesn’t question things unless they receive a take-down notice. There are lots of copyrighted materials on YT including audiobooks in many different languages.
I have put a lot of work into the Icelandic library and I always try to make sure nothing that’s copyrighted is being shared there without permission.
I have gone to great trouble to obtain permissions for a lot of copyrighted material and then put it into LingQ. I write how and from whom I got permission in the course description usually. I think what would be a great addition is that in addition to a “description” field, we could have “copyright” field for courses and/or lessons, where we could write why we are allowed to share the courses/lessons.