Time to leave Librivox - for the moment.

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

Yeah.. I'll have to look, but I'm not certain how visible it is that *anyone* can submit a short test file to Listeners/Editors Wanted with CC: in the subject line (for Constructive Criticism), and whatever the sort of feedback the reader specifically requests (and that can be up to and including 'anything you choose to comment on!') will be given.

Thanks for your long and thoughtful post. I know that took a lot of work!

-Catharine
digitaltoast
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Post by digitaltoast »

ceastman wrote:Yeah.. I'll have to look, but I'm not certain how visible it is that *anyone* can submit a short test file to Listeners/Editors Wanted with CC: in the subject line (for Constructive Criticism), and whatever the sort of feedback the reader specifically requests (and that can be up to and including 'anything you choose to comment on!') will be given.
Well, I never knew that! So, probably not that visible :)
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d.e.wittkower
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Post by d.e.wittkower »

First off, this is a nice, interesting discussion!

I'd like to present a vigorous defense of the PD licensing . . . but I also don't have time right now. I will say a few things though.

The books we deal with are part of our cultural heritage. I think we all should have the right to play around with them, edit, remix, and create with them. Why? Because "information should be free"? No - I'm not even sure I know what that claim is supposed to mean. We should have the right because these are the soil upon which our culture has grown, and we should be free to explore, challenge, and deform those things which make us who we are, for better or worse.

I don't want to police others. I don't want to fret and fuss about "my rights" and get up in other people's business. I want people to explore, play, and be creative. I want people to do whatever works for them, even if I hate it. Even my my own taste and sensibilities, ultimately, are a kind of censorship of which I do not approve.

I don't like the idea of corporations profiting from my labour. I (particularly as an Ashkenazi) also don't like the neo-Nazis who use my recordings for their misogynistic and white-power YouTube videos. But ultimately, (1) it would be difficult, annoying, and possibly futile to stop any such use, and (2) I think it is more important to provide freedom of use to those who will do something valuable than it is to prevent what in my eyes is misuse. The point in the second case is this: I can attempt to stop those doing ill and create a chilling effect, or I can encourage free expression, use, and enjoyment while letting corporations and anti-semites "off the hook" by refusing my supposed rights. To speak overdramatically, I prefer to let the evil prosper sometimes than to refuse benefit to the good. To say the same things in economic terms, I think that greater overall benefit is accrued by allowing freeriders than by a market controlled to the extent necessary to remove freeriders.

If your commitments are more individualist than social, then the PD license might not really work or make much sense to you. And that's fine - there's lots of room online for different projects. But I am committed to our work here because of my commitment to social media and open culture, and the PD license is absolutely central to that function.
Great Plains
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Post by Great Plains »

d.e.wittkower wrote:the neo-Nazis who use my recordings for their misogynistic and white-power YouTube videos.
Say what? :shock:
Daniel, the Cylon
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Shurtagal
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Post by Shurtagal »

DigitalToast - You contributed a lot and well, thank you for your time and contributions, you presence will be missed.

Your view points are very interesting. I understand your ideas but fervently disagree. Immediately below you will find my opinions, then followed by LV precedent threads.

As you know the commenting policy has been opened time and time again. Personally I feel that whether a person is critiqued or not they will improve given time, the only thing comments could do is speed that up. Even at that task they would be shaky, partly do to the easy ability for people to misconstrue "constructive criticism" as anger/derogatory/ and in general malignant intent. Furthermore, in general when people receive criticism unexpectedly they are liable to shut down - something that is never good. Also, through the use of positive comments (which are allowed) listeners can point out readers and aspects of readers that they like. Then these readers serve as examples for the rest; thus performing the same task that negative comments attempt. I would also point out that archive.org (where all LV files are hosted) does have a comment area. The use of which would allow you to comment and the reader to read that comment if they choose, whereas if the comment is here on the LV forums they reader would be forced to read it. Also, many readers do ask for "constructive criticism" at which point you are highly encouraged to do so politely.

RE Public Domain: Two main points: 1) If it come from the PD it should go back to the PD. Dust to dust ashes to ashes, or more aptly jewels to jewels. 2) Its easier to "police" as icyjumbo points out. Because there is nothing to violate we don't need to spend time chasing down violators, or finigelling exactly what can and can not be done. Also for the most part things that are put into the PD are respected and not messed with without proper politeness.

LV Precedent: No Comments Policy
public domain v.s. creative commons non-commercial
Public Domain v.s. Creative Commons (More recent)


It remains my opinion that the doors should never be closed on policy, particularly in an experimental project such as this, so thanks for bring your concerns to bear digitaltoast. also thanks to all the posters, I do love a fun polite debate Any way there's my two cents.

-Shurtagal

ED:
digitaltoast wrote:what about a mentoring sub-forum?
I think that this is pretty well covered in the Listeners wanted forum, just by adding CC to the subject line. (CC means constructive criticism) Perhaps this should be more publicly known. Could someone add that to the Help What if i suck page in the Wiki?[/quote]
Last edited by Shurtagal on March 26th, 2008, 8:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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hugh
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Post by hugh »

just occurred to me that the neonazis would be free to use a CC-SA-NC licensed recording of d.e.'s texts ... as long as they didn't make any money off of it!

UPDATE:
[and, also an aside, the schopenhauer videos are actually wonderful, although they are NOT associated with the unpleasant guys]
Last edited by hugh on March 27th, 2008, 6:31 am, edited 3 times in total.
icyjumbo

Post by icyjumbo »

I know I said I wouldn't comment again, but I have been thinking about how we can encourage people to improve their recordings where there is room for improvement. My wife and I in discussion came up with a couple of ideas.
  1. I wondered whether it would help to encourage new readers to proof-listen for a while, as well as read. I don't know exactly what to suggest as a policy here, but I know that when I listened to some recordings it helped me to understand what sort of standard of recording (as opposed to standard of reading) I wanted to reach. Proof listening is different from listening for pleasure, as it encourages one to listen for the sorts of problems that digitaltoast has mentioned.
  2. It is fairly clear, I think, that the use of CC constructive criticism marker isn't widely understood. The presence of an explicitly named forum area would make the "service" much more visible. I'd like to see this discussed a little more, if possible.
  3. Finally, I think it might be useful to institute a How I Did It section, in which people could post short articles about how they solved a particular problem in their recording or reading. Its emphasis would be different from the Need Help? Got Advice? area, in that it would be initiated by someone who has learned something and is willing -- even eager :-) -- to share that new learning with a supportive group of friends. Potentially the most valuable part of this could be a growing understanding of how to use a given piece of equipment in a given situation. There are enough of us here that there must be quite an overlap in equipment used and places/times/situations in which to record.
It became clear to me writing this that that I have been implicitly making a distinction between reading (pace, intonation, expression, etc.) and recording (volume, ambient noise, breathing, clicks, system noise, etc.). It might be useful to signpost that distinction a little more obviously in the forum. The wiki does contain a vast amount of information, but I think that the issues with recording quality raised by digitaltoast are more likely to be exhibited by beginners who are less likely to have stumbled across the wiki. If we were up-front about recording quality issues, then beginners would be able to understand those issues quickly. We don't have to be hard-nosed about it, nor force it down people's throats, but we could be more obvious about it.
d.e.wittkower
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Post by d.e.wittkower »

Great Plains wrote:
d.e.wittkower wrote:the neo-Nazis who use my recordings for their misogynistic and white-power YouTube videos.
Say what? :shock:
hugh wrote:just occurred to me that the neonazis would be free to use a CC-SA-NC licensed recording of d.e.'s texts ... as long as they didn't make any money off of it!

[and, also an aside, if i recall correctly, the videos are actually wonderful (the schopenhauer ones anyway), with no "extra" politics in them]
I don't want to distract from the main conversation, but I'll reply quickly.

Hugh - that really interesting Schopenhauer video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb3e7MhHjR0) is wonderful, and seems to have been put together by a biology professor.

The other ones were really just our recordings, along with a still frame (of e.g. Nietzsche) as the video track. They hadn't added anything, but – on some of them – the comments were strange, and their user's 'channel' pages were a mix of librivox titles and anti-semitic videos.

I am both somewhat chagrined and somewhat pleased to report that I can no longer find them, and the user accounts whose URLs I had saved have been removed by YouTube (who they, of course, called "JewTube" when they explained how their views would be censored).
digitaltoast
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Post by digitaltoast »

d.e.wittkower wrote:Hugh - that really interesting Schopenhauer video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb3e7MhHjR0) is wonderful, and seems to have been put together by a biology professor.
OK, I've just found another voice to add to my like-list! Really good vid - I don't see any neo-anything-ism there, but that was a really good read.
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d.e.wittkower
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Post by d.e.wittkower »

Oh, yes; certainly not! BonoboBill seems like a stand-up guy, and I actually assigned some of his other videos in my philosophy of science class last semester (an entertaining presentation on 'junk DNA' in the Y chromosome). The neo-nazis were other folks.

I contacted BonoboBill to thank him for making it, and to let him know that if he wants to make any other derivative works, we'd love to hear about it.
hugh
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Post by hugh »

i updated my post above.
prosfilaes
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Post by prosfilaes »

I don't buy that we have to police a license we use. A license is merely requesting the users to follow a set of rules. One can use the force of law to compel people to follow those rules as selectively as one wants.

My issues about a license have been more practical. First you need to clearly state what you want the license to do, removing those things that are unachievable and those that can't be clearly defined. For me, nothing I was doing was going to get me much money, and I couldn't clearly define when I wanted something reused and not, so those things have come down to releasing programs under the BSD/X11 license, which is basically public domain + keep my copyright notice.

We can't stop people from doing bad things with our audio. Bad people don't tend to care about copyright licenses, and any attempt to enumerate a list of bad things will end up permitting some bad things and excluding some good things.

A lot of the really extreme examples are unlikely. "I enjoy touching small boys" is probably minimal enough to be fair use anyway, and quite possibly libelous.
digitaltoast wrote:Fact is, how does this PD rule actually help the listeners, or Librivox, or indeed anyone or thing or cause?
It means that anyone can do anything they want without worries. I'm downloading material to send to my dad; it would be a lot more frustrating if I had to check to make sure that I could do that with every volume I've downloaded.
Yes, he would be OK with donating the song to the pi project, would be happy to add the intro and outro...but not if it had to be PD. I checked back here - one rule for all...we lost out, and who can blame him?
As opposed to what? Do we want people trading on LibriVox's name with material that can't be so much as redistributed in any way? How about material that can't be used by Nazis, or Jews, or South Africans? Every group like this has minimal rules so that users know they can download and read the books without worrying about violating licenses.

And once you have rules about licenses, you get complexity. You can have something like the Debian Free Software Guidelines which gives those posting their files a lot of options, but comes with a lot of debates about what it means. Even if you limit yourself to a set of Creative Commons license, or the like, you still are forcing readers to check licenses, and understand a number of fairly complex licenses.

The public domain is a simple choice that gives the most freedom to the people who use the files. If I were setting this up at the start, I would have used a simple license demanding attribution, but stare decisis is the best policy now.
genecode
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Post by genecode »

Point one: I could have never read anything without the non-negative criticism principle here in LV. Even if I had dared to take the first step, it might only have happened no eariler in one or two years, not now.

I became a libirvoxer reader merely one month ago or so while I've been a librivoxer listener for more than two years;
I've read stuff in PD in both my native language(various Chinese dialects) as well as English(Japanese will be in my to-read-list);
I've got tons of helps from warm-hearted librivoxer admins as well as fellow readers;
Now I am good to start my own go-solo project as well as able to help friends around with their recording(so far I just collected more than 10 Chinese dialects from people around me for a Libirvox Chinese poem project);
I do know there is still lots of room for improvement in my reading(and recording), but I have confidence in myself because there are always someone in Lv who are willing to help out.

Point 2:
this whole public domain thing - it might put some people off, but it's brought some forward;
I would never have considered Lv if there were sth more complicated rather than the PD policy.
Bead Krazy Dawn
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Post by Bead Krazy Dawn »

I need to add my bit here. I am disabled and live on a very small fixed income. I spent many a happy hour listening to LV recordings and was beyond thankful to everyone that had worked to put these great old books out there for anyone to enjoy.

Never would I have believed that I could one day record books that I love and add them to the treasure trove already available. I poked around the forums for weeks before I even considered contributing. What I liked the most was the ease of everyones attitude toward newbies. Any questions are answered happily and who cares if you "suck" at first, you will improve with practice and you can always go back and do it again until you feel it's right.

I have enjoyed proof-listening, adding my voice to a collaborative effort and have done a couple solo recordings. If someone wants to say they think I could improve here, or this would help you there, great. But I am afraid I am "fragile" enough that I would probably quit if someone swore at me and told be how useless I am.

There's a difference between caring help to better a project, and mean or degrading words because someone hates how you read. Thank you LV'ers for protecting me from the meanness, and encouraging me to learn and grow. So far I am happily blooming.
Dawn :D
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LeonMire
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Post by LeonMire »

icyjumbo wrote:I know I said I wouldn't comment again, but I have been thinking about how we can encourage people to improve their recordings where there is room for improvement. My wife and I in discussion came up with a couple of ideas....
icyjumbo, you and your wife came up with some good ideas here, and it just so happens that the admins are discussing ways to improve proof-listening. I'll make sure they see your post.
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