If I import using the Chrome Extension, LingQ captures the URL, and that means that when I give a rose to these lessons imported via the Chrome Extension, these lessons will appear in other people’s feeds, and they will be able to study them. It is as if I sent a URL via the feed, and if another person opens the lesson, it is like going to that website and importing via the Extension, except that I have already done that.
I just imported a few newspaper articles in Czech, Spanish and German, and will continue doing to in Polish, Russian and other languages. Let me know if you come across these lessons, and try doing the same yourself.
What about Copyright? It is one thing to import it privately, but if you give a rose it is the same as sharing something publicly.
Here in Germany (and other countries in Europe as well) there was a huge discussion about Google who shared only the beginning of articles, and that the publishers wanted to see money for these short parts (“Snippets”). How would they react if you share whole articles.
I think it is fine to share the links to the resources (as LingQ does on the Import page) and that users look on their own for the articles they like and import them.
If the publishers give access to their articles by means of links, they are available to anyone. In my opinion, this means that there is no copyright problem if the reader uses the text for himself and is not going to make money out of it.
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Yes, if you use it for yourself only, it is not a problem. If you share it with others, you have a copyright problem. By the way, there is no difference if you make money out of it or not says the law.
I think that sharing by providing the URL cannot be a copyright problem.
It is early days for us in terms of how best to use the Feed. Eventually we want to enable users to subscribe to their favourite sources of foreign language articles and content and see them in their feed.
We also want to allow members to share good sources. It is not our intention to enable our members to bypass pay walls that newspapers set up. In essence by selecting an article or lesson from the feed, the user is sent to the URL and the article is scraped and imported. Some newspapers allow unlimited copying and sharing, others limit the number of free articles. We don’t yet know how this will work when the user runs up against the free article limit or pay wall. I found , for example, that I was able to copy and paste and import an article from the New York Times, but could not use the Chrome Extension there even though I have a subscription. This may be one way papers protect their pay wall.
The subject of pay walls is somewhat controversial, see below. However, whatever the policy of an online newspaper, it is our policy to respect it. We just need to experiment a little more to figure out how best to achieve our goals and respect the commercial interests of media suppliers.
This paper addresses the contemporary issue of newspaper paywalls. The paper aims to analyse different paywall models and how they impact on media corporations’ revenues in the United States, the United Kingdom, Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland (Piano Media), Australia, New Zealand and Finland. The paper finds that newspaper paywalls provide roughly 10 per cent of media companies’ publishing/circulation revenues. The paper also finds that paywalls are softening and prices in some cases are decreasing as news corporations fight for new digital subscribers and revenues. The argument here is that the revenue generated by paid online news content is not substantial enough to make paywalls a viable business model in the short term. Media corporations do not disclose information about their digital subscription revenues and this lack of transparency might impact on research findingshttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/275176659_Newspaper_Paywalls-the_Hype_and_the_Reality
Bear in mind that articles will only show up in the feed if imported via the Chrome Extension, or include the URL and a picture. If you copy and paste the article and give it a rose, it will not show up in the Feed.