European LibriVox branch?

Comments about LibriVox? Suggestions to improve things? News?
kattekliek
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Post by kattekliek »

Hokuspokus wrote:For the moment I see (whatever we call it) as place for recordings, that can't be done here. I wouldn't want to quite LV because of the great people here, the atmosphere and all.
Same here! :) I think that - also because archive.org is such an easy and reliable way for hosting our audiobooks - we should refer recording of books that are in the US PD, to librivox.org . The new organisation would then be for books published from 1923 and having authors/translators who died >70 years ago (or if the server would be in Canada/Australia: > 50 years ago).
Do you live in Europe, Canada, Australia, ... any country where death date of author determines if a book is in the Public Domain? Come to legamus.eu to record books published in 1923 or later, written by authors dead since >70 years!
Starlite
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Post by Starlite »

I wonder if anyone thought to ask http://www.gutenberg.ca/ ? We have many of our books on Gutenberg.org so why not the Canadian alternative?

Esther :)
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable
people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress,
therefore, depends on unreasonable people." George Bernard Shaw
RuthieG
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Post by RuthieG »

Starlite wrote:I wonder if anyone thought to ask http://www.gutenberg.ca/ ? We have many of our books on Gutenberg.org so why not the Canadian alternative?

Esther :)
Just looked at their home page. Not sure that they are terribly keen on the Europeans at the moment... :lol:
My LV catalogue page | RuthieG's CataBlog of recordings | Tweet: @RuthGolding
annise
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Post by annise »

Go Canada - Australia gave in :twisted: - I tried PG Australia - but it is a one man operation and he said he wouldn't be able to .

Anne
kattekliek
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Post by kattekliek »

RuthieG wrote:
Starlite wrote:I wonder if anyone thought to ask http://www.gutenberg.ca/ ? We have many of our books on Gutenberg.org so why not the Canadian alternative?

Esther :)
Just looked at their home page. Not sure that they are terribly keen on the Europeans at the moment... :lol:
Oh, LOL :lol: But hey, we are Europeans that like the Bern convention and are not against +50 at all <insert holy smiley here>. So why not try & ask. The worst thing is they say 'no', but that's what we got right now as well!
Do you live in Europe, Canada, Australia, ... any country where death date of author determines if a book is in the Public Domain? Come to legamus.eu to record books published in 1923 or later, written by authors dead since >70 years!
Viktor
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Post by Viktor »

Name: When I chose "legamus" (Latin for: "let's read"), I looked for something general yet not totally of the road. If you wish so, I offer that domain - my current pages may well be "de.legamus.eu" or a different subdomain. Or something else in Latin or Greek? I like how such names are implicitly euro-centric and yet global. The top-level domain ".eu" could do the rest. - But I also don't mind an explicit "Eurovox" :-)

Forum: Sure, I'll open my forum tonight or latest tomorrow evening. As it's all phpBB3, we can always move it to a different URL and take my other content out, if we wish so.

Database: Who's the contact for the DB plumbing? Maybe we can take advantage of LV's learnt lessons. I understand that Wordpress was the easiest to start with; but whenever I touched it, it always felt somehow... brittle and "not-quite-as-I-want-it". In my experience, modifications are sometimes clumsier than a rewrite-from-scratch, at least for some particular parts. If LV could start over again, would we still choose Wordpress? I can try to construct a nice web application, but you'd need to have a bit of patience or someone would need to help me, as my spare time will be limited by the very soon arrival of a new member of the family ;-)

Competition:
Hokuspokus wrote:For the moment I see (whatever we call it) as place for recordings, that can't be done here. I wouldn't want to quite LV because of the great people here, the atmosphere and all.
Exactly! The goal is not at all for anyone to quit LV! It should only be a place for people from life+70 countries to do LV-like work that, for unfortunate reasons, cannot be part of LV.

Server placing:
kattekliek wrote: if the server(s) of this new organisation would be in a +50 country (Canada, Australia), we would have the widest possibilities. Canadians and Aussies can safely record +50 books, while a.o. EU-citizens should stick to reading +70 books only (analogous to how we deal with different copyright regulations at LV nowadays).
I don't know how one should handle English content. The majority of German listeners is living somewhere around Germany. But would we need to control downloads? If the server with English audiobooks is in a +50 country, must we stop people from non +50-countries from downloading? Would a warning be sufficient?
kattekliek wrote:And a remark on cloud based hosting: how can we make sure that all of the servers for the books are outside the US? Otherwise we might be in trouble; I think that the closer to the present the publishing dates of the books come, and the more popular the books, the bigger the problems for commercial parties will be (like e.g. the Agatha Christie issue on Librivox; I don’t think they could have ever won in court, but we simply do not have the resources to try that out).
Totally correct: we'd need to check before relying on a service. That's why I mentioned French free.fr but not Microsoft's Skydrive. Fortunately, in Europe things are, at least at the moment, relatively friendly for strict non-profits like us. As soon as something commercial shows up, though... Germany has its totally insane and unique Abmahnwesen where lawyers can send you takedown notices with huge bills in the spirit of "helping you not to break the law". Another reason why I'm happy to live in France where public culture is at least to some point still appreciated!
Viktor
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Post by Viktor »

RuthieG wrote:It would need much technical expertise, which I can't offer, and it won't start as small as LibriVox did at the beginning because there are so many established readers now. In other words, it would need a dedicated team right from the start and it would be hard work.
I hope that technically we can start slow as it will need some time to exhaust a forum server and the first terabytes... but organisationally we can take advantage of the great expertise you all have in these forums here :D
In other words, all those established readers already know how to organise readings. On the database and forum-add-on side (magic window and friends) it will be hard work, yes. That's why I'm happy to be part of the team. If all the technical stuff is only on me, it will take time :wink:
Starlite
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Post by Starlite »

kattekliek wrote:
RuthieG wrote:
Starlite wrote:I wonder if anyone thought to ask http://www.gutenberg.ca/ ? We have many of our books on Gutenberg.org so why not the Canadian alternative?

Esther :)
Just looked at their home page. Not sure that they are terribly keen on the Europeans at the moment... :lol:
Oh, LOL :lol: But hey, we are Europeans that like the Bern convention and are not against +50 at all <insert holy smiley here>. So why not try & ask. The worst thing is they say 'no', but that's what we got right now as well!
Email sent! :mrgreen:
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable
people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress,
therefore, depends on unreasonable people." George Bernard Shaw
kattekliek
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Post by kattekliek »

Viktor wrote:That's why I'm happy to be part of the team. If all the technical stuff is only on me, it will take time :wink:
To be honestly speaking, such things should never be on one person's back only (and certainly not on one who's becoming a father (again/for the first time?) very soon :thumbs: ) I'm also happy to be part of the team, but as a lousy manager I should not do that kind of tasks. I'm more talented in the field of auxiliary matters (of which, of course, also a lot will have to be done).
Do you live in Europe, Canada, Australia, ... any country where death date of author determines if a book is in the Public Domain? Come to legamus.eu to record books published in 1923 or later, written by authors dead since >70 years!
kattekliek
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Post by kattekliek »

Starlite wrote:Email sent! :mrgreen:
Nice :) We should however take in mind that, if they like cooperation at all, they probably wish to host only English and French language books - after all they are Canadians. But it would open up the +50 range too and that'ld be great for people living in such countries!
Do you live in Europe, Canada, Australia, ... any country where death date of author determines if a book is in the Public Domain? Come to legamus.eu to record books published in 1923 or later, written by authors dead since >70 years!
kattekliek
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Post by kattekliek »

Viktor wrote:Name: When I chose "legamus" (Latin for: "let's read"), I looked for something general yet not totally of the road. If you wish so, I offer that domain - my current pages may well be "de.legamus.eu" or a different subdomain. Or something else in Latin or Greek? I like how such names are implicitly euro-centric and yet global. The top-level domain ".eu" could do the rest. - But I also don't mind an explicit "Eurovox" :-)
I like 'legamus' very much; it is international (stretching beyond EU borders) and easy to pronounce.
I don't know how one should handle English content. The majority of German listeners is living somewhere around Germany. But would we need to control downloads? If the server with English audiobooks is in a +50 country, must we stop people from non +50-countries from downloading? Would a warning be sufficient?
Such a warning is sufficient for LV and I think will be also for a server in a country with different copyright rules. However, I would find it a bit of stretching the borders when for example Dutch +50 books would be published on a Canadian server and downloaded in perhaps 99% of the cases by residents of countries where they infringe local copyright by doing so.
Do you live in Europe, Canada, Australia, ... any country where death date of author determines if a book is in the Public Domain? Come to legamus.eu to record books published in 1923 or later, written by authors dead since >70 years!
Hokuspokus
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Post by Hokuspokus »

Ah! So many ideas!

Gutenberg.ca would be great, even if they only take English and French recordings.
I hope, they understand that there are not only bad Europeans but good ones as well. I cross my fingers.

As English text source there still are Gutenberg Canada and Gutenberg Australia. Australia has Lady Chatterley's Lover ;-)

I asked the search engine about Eurovox. There already is eurovox.com and eurovox.org. One is a telecommunication business. I guess we wouldn't want to be mixed up with a telecommunication business and I fear that they have some claim on the name. Legamus is a good name, but may I humbly suggest that we give a translation, once we create the page? I always wondered what it meant ... :oops:

Great that we can use your forum, Viktor! Thank you so much.
I'm all ignorant about the technical side of this all, but I learn quickly and I think I'm quite good at working under instructions. I have no opinion about Wordpress or some other blog thing. I would happily relay on other people's experience.

The servers for Microsoft's Skydrive are in Luxembourg. That would be OK for life+70 recordings. One more option.

I don't think that we need to prevent downloaders from countries with other law. Would that even be possible for a very small organisation? But I see another problem. Under German law there is no public domain and it is not so easy to make something gemeinfrei (this is not the same as pd), only by death, I think. We need to do some thinking about license terms that would express what we intend. I really do hope that copyright law is similar in all EU countries. Would be horrible to discover that we need extra license for each country.

The LV database guru is tis .

Best wishes for the future new family member, Viktor!
ExEmGe
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Post by ExEmGe »

As an 'umble reader, much power to everyone's elbow :!:
If I thought there was anything I could do to help I would, but try as I maight I can't think of anything useful. :(
Regards
Andy Minter
MsPhelps
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Post by MsPhelps »

Crawling out of the woodwork for this one (after some prodding from Bart, which was good!).
At the Dutch LV get-together last autumn this was discussed, and as a first step, I claimed the librivox.eu domain, so we as LV would at least have that domain if we ever want to use it. So that's available if we decide to go forward with this.

I also contacted Europeana at that time and got confirmation that indeed, they are not aiming at hosting files, only facilitating access to material that's hosted elsewhere. Nevertheless, my contact there was potentially willing to discuss possibilities... and I must admit that's where 'life' took over and I let it slide :oops:

I would be more than willing to provide the details about my contact with Europeana to someone here who's willing to take it up.

And, once again, the domain name is ours to use if we want to.

I still think it would be fabulous; I also think it would be fabulous if I had the time to actually help pursue this, but I really can't realistically promise that right now :|

Bianca
loving Children's Lit; working in a different kind of library
Cori
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Post by Cori »

I wonder if the http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0 licence is available in Germany yet -- it's a legal version of the Public Domain Mark, and seems like it'd be how we'd release things if not plain PD.
There's honestly no such thing as a stupid question -- but I'm afraid I can't rule out giving a stupid answer : : To Posterity and Beyond!
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