If you volunteer to record for LibriVox, you must agree to release the audio files you make into the public domain. This means that anyone can use those audio files however they wish.
What does “however they wish” mean, exactly? People may use our recordings to profit; they may remix them into other projects; they do not need to give credit to the individual reader/writer/creator or to LibriVox. Anyone may do all kinds of things that you would prefer them not do - and you have no recourse to change that. For example you might see:
CDs of Romance of Rubber sold as a fundraiser for a charity you don’t like;
Origin of the Species as background atmosphere for a pornographic film;
Fables for the Frivolous sampled into a violent rap song;
The summary of Frankenstein used to promote a major motion picture;
Your recording clipped apart and rearranged as a ransom note, signed with your name and city.
Screw that! Turns out that people are selling our work on ebay and other places.
The other thing that bothered me and a couple of others is…what’s the point in trying, when they seem happy to accept anything and everything, quantity over quality every time.
How do you know you’re not downloading something like this:
while missing out on something good like this:
There seems to be no peer review or rating, in fact, it’s actively discouraged. It’s a real shame, and this ridiculous and unnecessary Public Domain nonsense means they’re missing out on some good recordings.
Have you ever tried to advertise in the Phone Book or Yellow Pages?
You’ll know it’s incredibly expensive, because they claim such blanket coverage.
And yet, more than half of all Yellow Pages and Phone Books remain unopened. All that processed paper, all those chemicals, all that delivery cost.
Who uses them these days? Directory enquiries are now free again, almost everyone has access to a free directory via a computer, so why bother dumping a couple of kilos of carbon footprint on my door every year?
I rang them and said that I not only didn’t want them (same as I said last year), but that I wanted it to be noted that there was one less copy in print. How could I note that? Apparently, I can’t!
If anyone knows of a campaign to get BT and Yell to have the phone book and YP as opt-in only, I’d love to know. Comment form below!
I’m a Flock convert - I thought I’d never leave Firefox, and in a way, I haven’t. Flock is Firefox on speed, supporting loads of services like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Gmail…I could go on! Oh, and all the Firefox extensions and Toolbars work on Flock too.
It takes a little while to work it all out, and I haven’t even got the half of it yet, but it’s really nice to have everything integrated into one place, instead of having gazillions of toolbars messing up the place.
Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler was infamous for eugenics programs which attempted to maintain a “pure” German race through a series of programs that ran under the banner of “racial hygiene”.
. In a modern context, it would mean selectively discriminating against a gene which the parent didn’t see as pure. For example, imagine a desperate couple wanting IVF treatment, but stipulating that it must be blond with blue eyes, because anything else would be defective and therefore not pure in your idea of a master race.
Fast forward 70 years and have a listen to this:
Here’s a transcript provided by Stop Eugenics. It doesn’t say what its stance is on this matter - I’m assuming it would be against embryo selection.
I’m glad to see I’m not alone in being utterly appalled at this according to this BBC Have Your Say.
He sees anyone as having all five senses as being inferior. How sad it is that we can’t appreciate a deaf play. Every single comment had him looking down at the inferior beings with their wretched sense of hearing. For he wants to make the pure, superior race with their master language and ability to need a translator to interpret everything for them.
Clearly, this Tomato Lichy is a very selfish, self-centred individual. Let’s just hope his next child doesn’t suffer because of his mental illness.
UPDATE: The Moral Maze covered this - here is the audio
Notes: Here’s an interesting blog, showing the kind of in-fighting that this so-called “audism” brings about.
What’s he saying in the videos? I have no idea. And I’m very sorry I don’t use BSL, but I can’t read Braille either. But then, I don’t speak Urdu either - does that make me a racist?
