RUS/РУС: difficulty finding copyright-free material

Content Forum
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Can you please help me find decent Russian language resources which are suitable for sharing on LingQ?

Both audio and text must be copyright free. That either means the author has been dead for 70+ years (I’m using this as a guide: Commons:Copyright rules by territory - Wikimedia Commons) or the author has waived standard copyright protection on their work under Creative Commons, or similar.

Where audio is available and copyright free AND it’s not derived from a copyrighted text, I can use Whisper to extract text from it. I don’t begrudge the work needed to format Whisperised text and am confident that my Russian is now good enough that I can proof-read what the tool exports.

Because translations from other languages into Russian are generally copyrighted (where the originals may well be copyright-free), one is pretty much shoe-horned into turning to Pushkin, Chekhov, Dostoevsky et al. Naturally, these guys are great, but there’s more to Russian than the classics.

I guess this is problem for all of the languages not most commonly studied as foreign tongues.

Thanks!

Steve

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Have you considered asking some YouTubers/Podcasters for the right to use their materials on LingQ courses? I bet a lot of them would agree if they knew what you were doing with it.

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Yeah, i think this should work. I learn German and when I read some of the ready to go texts, I can see a disclaimer at the end, where the one who imported the text to LingQ thanks the author of the text for allowing to import it.

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Thanks for the replies folks. I’ve fired off a few requests for permission before, but been dismayed by the low consent-to-being-ignored ratio. I guess I just need to dust myself off, get back to the hustle and get spamming again. Was it Napoleon who said, “quantity has a quality all of its own”? :wink:

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Try YouTuber @domidiom6233 he’s Russian and Speaks Portuguese and likely would enjoy more viewers as a side effect of you sharing his content. Good Luck!