File talk:Recording of speaker of British English (Received Pronunciation).ogg

Information concerning the file Recording of speaker of British English (Received Pronunciation).ogg

The recording in question was made to accompany an article on Received Pronunciation in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association (vol 34.2, 2004), written by me as sole author. I had to make a long search to find a suitable speaker to record. The one I eventually found gave me permission to use the recording for publication in any way I chose. The resulting article is regarded as the IPA's definitive description of Received Pronunciation, and this particular recording therefore constitutes a historically important document. To submit any other recording in its place would make nonsense of the description contained in the published article, and WP would therefore not have the authentic recording.

Before submitting this to Wikipedia as a contribution to the article on Received Pronunciation I made sure that the International Phonetic Association (of which I am a Life Member and former Honorary Secretary) would be content for the article to be used. The reply of the current Secretary, Professor Pat Keating, was as shown below:

Dear Peter,

The International Phonetic Association grants permission for you to post on Wikipedia the audio recording and wordlist that are part of your article “British English: Received Pronunciation”, published as an Illustration of the IPA in the December 2004 issue of the Journal of the IPA.

Sincerely,

Patricia Keating

Professor of Linguistics, UCLA

Director of the Phonetics Lab

Secretary of the International Phonetic Association

The other correspondence I had with officers of the IPA in preparation for the submission to WP may be seen on the latest section of my Talk page. RoachPeter (talk) 11:53, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

29 Jan 2014: i disputed the decision to block access to this file, but have heard nothing since. Could someone please tell me if anything is happening? RoachPeter (talk) 16:09, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

British English still exists, so a freely licensed replacement can easily be created. See for example WP:NFC#UUI §1. --Stefan2 (talk) 16:14, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, am I meant to take this comment seriously? Did you actually read what I wrote above? RoachPeter (talk) 19:22, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Why cant we have the same person, or someone with similar vocal patterns do it under a free license? Werieth (talk) 20:51, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

They are giving it under a free license. And read the comment you responded under. — kwami (talk) 01:36, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

I do not see any at any point in the quoted text a release of copyright, at best I see permission given for a single instance of re-use. Werieth (talk) 01:44, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

I have asked the International Phonetic Association to restate their position on the recording I have submitted. This is appended below.

Secretariat International Phonetic Association Department of Linguistics UCLA Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543 USA [email protected]

January 20, 2014

To Whom It May Concern:

I write as Secretary of the International Phonetic Association to affirm that the Association is the sole owner of the exclusive copyright of the audio recording and wordlist that are part of Professor Peter Roach’s article “British English: Received Pronunciation”, published as an Illustration of the IPA in the December 2004 issue of the Journal of the IPA. The Association agrees to make this work available under the free license "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported" and GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). We acknowledge that by doing so we grant anyone the right to use the work in a commercial product or otherwise, and to modify it according to their needs, provided that they abide by the terms of the license and any other applicable laws. We are aware that this agreement is not limited to Wikipedia or related sites. We are aware that we always retain copyright of this work, and retain the right to be attributed in accordance with the license chosen. Modifications others make to the work will not be claimed to have been made by us. We acknowledge that we cannot withdraw this agreement, and that the content may or may not be kept permanently on a Wikimedia project. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

Patricia A. Keating

Secretary of the International Phonetic Association IPA website: http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/

Professor of Linguistics, UCLA

I hope you will find this satisfactory. RoachPeter (talk) 09:46, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

See WP:CONSENT for the correct process. There is currently no OTRS ticket. --Stefan2 (talk) 16:00, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

The wording of Prof.Keating's message given above seems to me to follow WP:CONSENT to the letter. Am I wrong? I was told that the OTRS ticket is an alternative way to getting WP approval for a submitted recording and that I should go through this process later. Was this information wrong? RoachPeter (talk) 17:54, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

IMHO it would be easiest to re-upload the file under the intended free license “Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported” with a slightly modified file name, then change the file name in the article Received Pronunciation and finally delete this file with the old license and file name. It might be a good idea to re-upload the file to the Commons so it can be used in other Wiki projects like German Wikipedia. Same goes for the scan of the transcriptions. LiliCharlie (talk) 18:59, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm grateful for the advice, but to be honest I feel that even if I put the work into doing what you suggest, the uncompromising attitude of Stefan2 and Werieth means that I would just get the thumbs down again. It's clear that I was misguided in submitting this material for WP in the first place, and I think the best thing now is just to leave it to its fate and move on. RoachPeter (talk) 16:29, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

What do you expect them to do? Being laymen without phonetic training they can’t judge the reproducibility of the recording. Even the original speaker wouldn’t be able to reliably reproduce the text in the manner shown in the etic/narrow transcription. Besides they don’t seem to know much about the diversity of English accents in Southern England (let alone the rest of the UK), nor about the recent history of the International Phonetic Alphabet and its application to RP. LiliCharlie (talk) 21:24, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

As explained at WP:CONSENT, the copyright holder should send the permission statement directly to OTRS, not to a user who pastes it to a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia pages can easily be faked, and a copy on a Wikipedia page is therefore useless. See Commons:COM:GOF for details. --Stefan2 (talk) 18:13, 8 February 2014 (UTC)