Is it legal to import Slow Chinese lessons as open lessons?

I have started to use these lessons and have imported some of them as private lessons. Am I legally allowed to share them openly?

PS No Captcha! Wonderful!

You can find “Slow Chinese by www.slow-chinese.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.” on the About-page of the website. It cannot be shared as LingQ is a commercial website. But it is no problem to use them as private lessons.

There are a number of these lessons scattered already throughout the open library, with attribution.

You can double check with Xinyu over at slow chinese.

Also worth keeping this type of thing in mind – “Please visit the site and leave a small donation if you find this useful” etc. Login - LingQ

If there are already lessons from them in the library, the question is if the user got permission to share them or if the content provider himself has shared these lessons. According to the license there is no permission to share them.

Yes, I knew there were a number of these lessons already in the library. That is why I asked the question. I am thinking that the lessons are probably not legal.

These were shared by Shigeharu quite a while ago.

“Lessons from slow-chinese.com http://www.slow-chinese.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Over thirty articles including text and audio. Please visit the site and leave a small donation if you find this content useful.”

I will try to ask Shigeharu if he got permission. If he did not, I will contact the creators of this site to ask for permission.

I obtained permission personally some years ago, so there is no problem.

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Thanks Steve and Shigeharu. I hope you don’t mind if I import some more recent lessons.

I have already imported some lessons privately. I believe I need a course picture and a course description if I am to make these lessons public. I have added a description but cannot find out how to add a photo. Steve, where can I find the window to do this?

@Ginkgo: The ‘unspoken’ rule is that the person who has asked for permission has the prior right to import the lessons. But if this person is not interested, others can import them. So you should ask Shigeharu, or you could take his last answer as a permission. I would understand his answer that it is ok for him.

Any chance the courses with Slow Chinese lessons can be merged? Currently there are at least 6 separate courses, with overlapping lessons. Suggest just one course and give the 6, or more, members permission to edit same course.

Personally I’m not bothered, by this specifically, I went through the first 66 lessons Xinyu put out many,many times years ago, and I don’t use this course any more. But each time I look at the Mandarin library it always makes me think how much better it could be.

Unfortunately there isn’t a simple solution for this, as lesson and courses exist in the separate user’s accounts. What you can do, however, is create a playlist of all these lessons in the order you think might be best. You can then share this playlist.

Alex, Would this stop people continually uploading the same lessons over and over? Would this make the Mandarin library any less cluttered and complicated?

No, it wouldn’t prevent that, though if there are multiple versions of the exact same lesson you’re welcome to let us know and we’ll happily remove the duplicates so as to respect the person who uploaded it first.