Question Copyright (dot org) asked a number of people in Chicago (on what looks like a university campus) what the purpose of copyright is. The film takes a little under 11 minutes and is titled “Interviews, Chicago 2006.” The answers varied somewhat.
A couple of lessons I learned from my distributed translation experiment:
1. Don’t worry about volunteers showing up. Initially nobody seemed to be interested in participating, but after a while somewhere from ten to twenty people turned up, which was more than enough for my purposes. I had advertised my experiment in four places: this blog, the Dutch forum at Distributed Proofreaders, a chatty general purpose Usenet group, and a mailing list for (non-literary) professional translators. OK, so do worry, a lot. :) Thing is, if you’ve made something interesting, people will come and take a peek.
2. Don’t just dabble. I set up the site as minimally as possible using the very simple Usemod wiki. Usemod is great because it so small; you can easily modify it if you have simple needs. Unfortunately, spammers found out about the site rather quickly and began hitting it heavily. If I had used better developed software, such as the Mediawiki, I could probably have turned on all kinds of anti-spam measures that were now not available to me, and that would have been too much work to develop. Even then I could probably have switched to Mediawiki, but that seemed too much work to me for a simple experiment. In hind-sight that would have allowed me to keep the experiment running, so it’s a pity I chose not to take that path.
3. Don’t underestimate your volunteers. I had assumed that the level of quality would be fairly high, but perhaps a little too consistent; and in order to remedy this I had planned to add a few bad translations myself (remember, the experiment was to measure differences in consistency). Not necessary, it turned out. The quality of submitted translations was both high and varied.
4. Let your volunteers find things out for themselves. I had planned a translation dictionary, but nobody used the pages I set up for that. No need to provide your volunteers with things you think they would need, only provide them with what they actually need.
Looking at other translation projects:
5. There are more ways to skin a cat. My experiment was set up to find out what happens when different volunteers tackle one paragraph at a time. That idea was borrowed from Distributed Proofreaders, where volunteers work at one page at a time. My fear was that you cannot slowly build a literary translation when every translated paragraph ends up with a different style (Wikipedia syndrome). My hope was that you could solve this problem by having post-processors try to smooth out the differences.
Harry auf Deutsch worked this way; volunteers would each get assigned a small bunch of pages; then chapter managers would iron out the differences chapter-wide, and a book manager would do something similar for an entire book.
I have since seen another distributed translation project that takes a radically different approach. Although volunteers there are still free to tackle a work one paragraph at a time, in practice they work on much more, sometimes even on entire novels at a time. The difference is that they limit themselves in the quality levels they try to achieve. The first volunteer or set of volunteers uses software to generate a machine translation. The second volunteer for a work tries to produce a rough translation from the machine translation. The third tries to clean up that rough translation a bit.
About a month a go I promised I would blog a bit about the difference between the major Dutch projects for public domain e-books.
I’m talking about:
That’s a pretty narrow subset of all literature ever created, but it works for me, because I’m Dutch, I can read, I have an internet connection, and I don’t like others to dictate what I should and should not do with that which I download. Also I don’t mind reading off a screen as long as that screen is attached to a pocket-sized lightweight hand-held device.
The major distinctions between Project Gutenberg, Project Laurens Jz. Coster (henceforth: Project Coster) and the Digitale Bibliotheek der Nederlandse Letteren (DBNL) in terms of literary content are:
All three projects carry some of the major public domain classics, and all three projects carry obscure novels.
There are some differences in process that may or may not matter to you, depending on your needs. The DBNL claims copyrights on all of its works, regardless of whether they are really in the public domain or not. I tend to regard copyright notices on public domain works as declarations of intent to bite, and will stay away from them.
Project Coster seems to be “dead”. I e-mailed with its head honcho Marc van Oostendorp a couple of years ago, and he as good as confirmed that nothing was happening at Project Coster. Perhaps that has changed in the meantime; at least someone is still taking care of the hosting. On the other hand the broken image on its homepage may be a gentle reminder that you need not look for new versions of old books there.
Project Gutenberg takes all of its works from volunteers, and most of them from a volunteer organisation called Distributed Proofreaders. What’s that to you? Well, if you have scans of public domain books, you might try and run them through Distributed Proofreaders. They’ll do a large part of the error correction and formatting, leaving the stitching together of the pages to you.
Although the DBNL and Project Coster do not release data on the size of their catalog, sampling of their database leads me to believe that their catalogues are bigger than the one of Project Gutenberg, which does release such data.
At the time of writing Project Gutenberg is about to hit 300 etext numbers for Dutch works, which equates approximately to 300 unique works (there are a few bundled works there that are also available separately).
This just in: when checking the DBNL link, I noticed they now prominently feature a rich linguistics section on their front page.
Summary: two years ago, I asked people on the internet to help me create a public domain translation of a public domain source text, Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart. The goal was to help establish whether it was possible for a disparate group of translators to create a literary translation. You will find both a description of the experiment and the results below.
The British “Federation Against Software Theft,” a sort of RIAA for software, wants ISPs to determine whether their paying customers are file sharers. Until now F.A.S.T. had to go through that most horrid forms of mediation: the legal system. The organisation’s boss John Lovelock thinks that to “go through the courts and get a court order [...] is [...] awfully long-winded [and] archaic.” Dutch internet lawyer Remy Chavannes comments: “The vigilantes of F.A.S.T. are frustrated [...] and would like to play judge. [...] But even on the internet taking the law in your own hands is not a solution.”
Via the Iusmentis blog (Dutch).
Joep’s wonderlijke avonturen
When I first read Herman Heijermans’ “Joeps wonderlijke avonturen” (Jack’s Wondrous Adventures) I was pleasantly surprised for two reasons. The first was that it was by far not as bad as I had expected based on what little I knew from Heijermans, third hand knowledge I had about his play “Op hoop van zegen” (translated in English in 1928 as The Good Hope). You see, in the days I first read Joep’s, a film had been made of the play; and though I had not read the play, nor watched the play or watched the movie, the latter was talked about so much that it was hard not to escape the idea that “Op hoop van zegen” was melodramatic trash.
The second was that for a large part, Joep’s is a sort of Dutch Frankenstein. Although there apparently were some late 19th / early 20th century Dutch authors that had dabbled in the fantastic (I am thinking of Carel van Nievelt), back then I had yet to come across one.
Joep’s tells the story of a man who has lost sight in both eyes. An eccentric professor tells Joep that he can cure him by transplanting animal eyes. Having little to lose, Joep agrees to the procedure. Unfortunately, he manages to damage his new eyes on several occasions and has to get new ones.
Shelley’s story about Frankenstein’s monster is typically pessimistic in tone; it questions what makes us human, and whether this ‘what’ can be transplanted into non-human beings. And when does a human being lose his humanity? Joep’s does something similar; when the protagonist gets a different animal’s eyes, his character changes too.
This character growth is for the long term though, and so the story nicely segues into its second half. Where Joep starts out as a major misanthropist, his regained eyesight also forces him to see not just his surroundings through new eyes, but also himself.
Upon second reading, the book has lost some of its sparkle to me. Authors could be very wordy in those days, and from what I have read by Heijermans, he particularly seemed to like the sound of his own written voice. The “what I’ve read by” includes fragments of Diamantstad, which ends on a very moralistic note, as does Joep’s. Something I could have done without, especially since Heijermans proves himself to be a talented author otherwise. Critics of his time claimed that his lack of quality was the result of his prolific output. In 1908, the year he published Joep’s, he published four other works. Speaking in his defense though, Heijermans has a knack of realistically shielding the protagonist from seeing other characters the way the reader sees them, which can produce nice foreboding, if the author can pull it off.
I had hoped to send this book to Project Gutenberg, but unfortunately my copy is from 1934, whereas PG for copyright reasons only takes works printed before 1923.
My rating: stars
There are three major e-book projects that make electronic books available for free to the general public in accessible formats (usually HTML, sometimes “plain text”). One is Project Gutenberg, an American project that does not limit itself to English. I am a volunteer there. The second is Project Laurens Jz Coster, named after the Dutchman who stole Gutenberg’s ideas for movable type in order to claim he had invented movable type himself. The third is the Digitale Bibliotheek Nederlandse Letteren.
The latter claims a copyright on texts that are clearly in the public domain: a wholly despicable practice that is morally equivalent to fraud. If I could avoid linking to them, I would. Unfortunately they are jealousy inducingly active, and also have managed to convince many authors and estates to let them publish books that are indeed still in copyright.
One of these books is Battus’ Opperlandse taal- & letterkunde, the definitive book for playfully documenting the many quirks of the Dutch language. Battus is the pseudonym for Hugo Brandt Corstius, a computer linguist who knows how to write. The DBNL publishes the 2nd edition of 1981.
I’ll explain the differences between the three projects in greater detail in a future post, because all three projects have their own distinctive strengths, which it helps to know when you are looking for a certain Dutch classic.
Brian Flemming reports that the Youtube account of the Rational Response Squad has been deleted in response to false copyright claims by a creationist group called Creation Science Evangelism Ministries. The Rational Response Squad, an activist group of so-called New Atheists, had been posting videos that discussed claims by the creationist group. These videos included quotations of videos by Creation Science Evangelism Ministries. Presumably the DMCA complaints center around these quotations.
Atheists are a repressed minority in the USA. According to a recent study they are the least trusted group in the country (the researchers had originally included them as the neutral choice, in the mistaken belief that nobody would have a negative opinion of atheists). They cannot get high-profile jobs such as political offices, and there are plenty of stories known about atheists and non-Christians who get raw deals from the courts.
The DMCA is a section of American copyright law that provides a so-called safe harbour to providers that respond quickly to copyright complaints. In order to make sure that this safe harbour provision is not abused by those who want to leverage the might of the state to silence critics, the person who brings the complaint will have to swear on penalty of perjury that he is the proper copyright owner. Unfortunately this provision has so far failed to be succesful. Estimates reveal that about one third of all DMCA take-down notices are flawed. Providers typically lack the personnel to make this judgment though, and will take down even non-infringing works as soon as a DMCA complaint comes in.
In the USA it is generally considered fair use, that is: non-infringing, if you use quotations in a critique. (The Netherlands has a similar exemption in copyright law.)
Here’s a fallacy that in these fast moving times I observe on a regular basis: people on the internet arguing that everything on the internet is wrong. People using free software to argue that free software sucks (a recurring occurrence at Slashdot). Jack Valenti arguing for eternal copyright, yet nobody wants to read his book.
It’s like you have two playgrounds: one where all the cool kids play and one where all the losers play. So one of the losers goes to the cool playground, kicks a stone, and keeps saying to the cool kids: “this playground sucks, I am going to leave any minute now.”
Unfortunately with copyright policy it is the losers who set the tune.
Copyprof Michael Geist has an excellent article up roughly outlining how the US is blackmailing most of the rest of the world into adopting copyright laws even more ridicous than it already has. Basically the idea is that the US wants to force other countries to buy its wares while offering nothing in return. (The US is one of only two net exporters of “content” in the world.)
The surprising thing is that a mainstream publication like the BBC publishes this.
(Thanks BoingBoing.)
Local news: the cabal of Dutch record companies has decided that anyone who wants to podcast in this country, can, for a modest fee of 1000 euro a year. Yeah, whatever.
(Thanks Natasha.)