What’s of interest? Your guide to German folklore! - Sunken Castles, Evil Poodles
Tell me more!
Sunken Castles, Evil Poodles is an ongoing project for translating old German folklore tales into English. All translations are released under a Creative Commons Zero license, and thus can be freely copied and reused for commercial and non-commercial purposes alike, without any restrictions.
This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.
I wandered via the map to Turkey for The Knight of Land Harm including the tale of a ruthless knight who died in 1369, with a royal name of Landschaden meaning “harm to land”. His son, who took up a crusade, was given by the Emporor the right to “bear the head of the slain enemy as a crest in his coat of arms”
Fun times! These stories are a sublte gold mine, and whole not specified on the wiki, the main web site shared them into the public domain using CC0.
Very cool! It took me a few minutes to figure out that it’s the wiki that’s openly licensed, not the books - and as you pointed out, there’s no license on the wiki itself.
Excited to pass this along to my friends in the ENGL department!
I spotted this in Mastodn and asked the site owner about it. They said it was “on his list to do” to add licensing to the wiki. I think he creates more polished ones opublished to his $ supporters with “commentary”
The web site states all translations they have been made are CC0- I doubt there is copyright on old fairy tales so the translations are not copyrightable.
Sunken Castles, Evil Poodles is an ongoing project for translating old German folklore tales into English. All translations are released under a Creative Commons Zero license , and thus can be freely copied and reused for commercial and non-commercial purposes alike, without any restrictions.
Translations of public domain works do fall within copyright… although I think translations done by AI are not? There’s probably a raging debate somewhere about this.
I can’t hear the drums of that debiate But this person is doing all the translations themself, no AI. And fairy tales are going to be so old and not traceable to a single author that they ought to be public domain. That seems exactly what the domain is for!
As an updated, the creator of this resource Jürgen Hubert notified me that he has added a declaration of his translations being now available under CC0 as detailed on his wiki’s declaration page
His response included his interest in offering more content available as public domain, but seeks some help in doing this.
My basic concept is that the translations are under CC0, while the additional commentary is restricted to those who subscribe to my Patreon or buy my books.
Nevertheless, I would be open to creating additional educational materials for those tales under a CC0 license. However, since I have no background in education I would probably need assistance in the form of a collaboration.
I am suggested maybe he joins OEG Connect so he can benefit from the larger pool of expertise here than just me. Is anyone interested?
I approve of public domain works in general, which is why I put my translations under a Creative Commons Zero license. The way I see it, the original publications are now in the public domain, so it’s only fair to make the English-language versions free as well.
I have not made the added commentary I’ve published on my Patreon and in my books available under CC0 so far. But I would not be averse to contributing to added free material for educational purposes that uses these tales as a base.
However, I have no background in education. I merely held a few lectures in Computational Materials Engineering when I was a PhD student, and that’s about it.
So I need some help here before I start writing anything for educational purposes. At the very least, I need some use cases or user stories:
Who is the target audience?
What is the teaching goal?
A full-fledged collaboration with experienced educators would probably be best for such a project.
Legally speaking, while the original works in which these tales were published have long fallen into the public domain, their (human-created) translations represent a new creative, transformative work. So I could claim copyright on them - I just choose not to.
AI translations, on the other hand, represent mere automate procession of the original source, and both by American and German law you cannot claim copyright on such.
