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I checked our webserver logs to see which websites hotlink audio files from Tatoeba. To my surprise, I found 17 unique websites over the past two weeks. Mostly online language learning platforms. I could see that many of them do not give proper attribution, but some also violate the non-commercial clause of some audio, as well as the "no offsite use" clause.
On the one hand, I could contact each of them to ask to give proper attribution or stop commercial use. As a developer and sysadmin of Tatoeba I could even prevent hotlinking and effectively break their platform.
On the other hand, the general goal of Tatoeba is to spread knowledge and I don’t want to mess around just for the sake of some licence restrictions. After all, only the member who created the audio can legally complain.
So should Tatoeba do something about that?
On a side note, I’d like to point out that many of our audio contributors use a Creative Commons licence with a non-commercial restriction. While this immediately makes sense (don’t want to have somebody making profit out of something I put a lot of effort into), in practice, the line between commercial and non-commercial is quite blurry, and there are lots of use cases involving money exchange that are pretty fair. For example, I would not be able to include such audio in a presentation made at a convention or conference (like Polyglot Conference Global), just because there is an entrance fee. More about that: https://kefletcher.blogspot.com...ommercial.html
I think personally, in an ideal world we'd be able to just let them do their thing and ultimately move forward our ultimate goal of language learning. Spread knowledge, as you said. I'm trying to reach out to other app developers and language learners to tell them about Tatoeba so they can use the data.
But knowing how legal issues can be nasty, and that people here feel a different purpose for Tatoeba, I don't know what the best course of action would be.
In hindsight, the attribution would bring more awareness to the project which is a plus, and I didn't realize that yesterday. Plus it's legally necessary based on our license.
Kohtelias pyyntö mainita Tatoeba, kun sen sisältöä käyttää, voisi ainakin olla paikallaan. Pyyntöön voisi kirjoittaa valmiin html-koodipätkän tai tekstipätkän, jonka sivuston ylläpitäjä voisi lisätä suoraan sivustolleen.
Tämä ei täytä lain vaatimuksia äänitteiden epäkaupallisesta käytöstä, mutta toisaalta on vähemmän hyökkäävä ja täten saa todennäköisemmin jotain aikaan. Jos pyyntöön reagoidaan, voi sitten jutella äänitiedostojen lisensseistä.
I see two benefits to requiring the larger sites to respect the licenses of our content, and in particular to attribute Tatoeba:
- As contributors, we would have more incentive to participate if we know our rights are being enforced.
- More learners would get to know Tatoeba if sites respected CC-BY just as well as japandict.com and linked to the sentence pages. Plus Tatoeba's SEO would be improved thanks to all these new backlinks.
Commercial usage is needed to be stopped, and following what the license says is the better.
> I could contact each of them to ask to give proper attribution or stop commercial use.
I've actually done that before when I came across a site using sentences and audio from Tatoeba without proper attribution. I emailed the site owner to point out that CC BY requires attribution and also that some of the audio files do not have a license at all that would allow other people to use them.
They responded very quickly that they would take the site down and indeed they did. I guess that because I used too many scary legal terms, they got worried about getting sued and decided that taking down everything was less work and safer than adding attribution links after the fact. That wasn't the outcome I had hoped for, so one takeaway is to appear as nonthreatening as possible.
But I think once your work on multi-audio support is merged, it would be a good opportunity to tell those hot-linking users about it (hopefully getting them into a cooperative mood) and then request that they add attribution links or exclude files where their use isn't covered by the license.
Could you maybe send me the list of these websites? Or tell me the command that you used to extract this list :)
We should definitely approach them. Doing that once we have the multi-audio support ready, as Yorwba suggested, would be a very good idea, I think.