I’m building my private section of the subtitles for a series without audio just text.
I know that it’s probably copyrighted but does anyone know if publication of such material falls under fair use, so I can make it public.
I don’t mind having it private just want to provide some stuff to other people.
As far as US laws go at least (though other countries mirror it), the material is 100% exempt and it is perfectly OK to share under the fair use doctrine. Specifically, the incorporation of otherwise copyrighted work in your creation (a LingQ lesson) passes with flying colors all four of the tests for “fair use” required by Section 107 of the US Copyright Act. Additionally, the same and even more generous exemptions are permitted under the “Fair Dealing“ permitted by Section 29 of the Copyright Act of Canada, where LingQ is based.
Moreover, LINGQ is a platform in this case and not a publisher. They are not the ones “publishing” the material, you are. And even if it were protected somehow, anyone with a Netflix or YouTube account or wherever else the sources are from, has a legal right to access it anyway.
For this reason, I have said in other threads that I am willing to share all of the hundreds of hours of Netflix shows and movies I have imported into LingQ. However I haven’t put it into the library or otherwise made it public per se because I don’t have any audio with it and I think all the public material on LingQ has to have audio. That is something the staff can weigh in on. I’ve never actually tried to do it before so I’m not sure if there is a way to make material accessible to just certain people or if there’s a way to share the material without otherwise becoming an official part of the library and users expecting there to be audio.