Has anyone been following what's going on with Idahosa's "Mimic Method" of late? Idahosa has always bugged me a bit with his talk about "flow" -- not because it's a bad idea, but because he's invented a new word where we already have a perfectly good one: prosody. And unlike most of the amateurs on the net, he's someone who seems to have enough of an academic background to know this. So rather than competing in the marketplace for "best course for prosody", he's hiding what he's talking about to make it seem like he's the only guy dealing with this part of language. That seems kind of dishonest to me. I also find his focus on rap to be a bit weird, given how rap doesn't always actually respect the prosody of the host language, instead building up complex percussive rhythms that wouldn't occur in speech. Anyway, his latest project's a bit of a weird one. He's making an app as a sort of add-on for DuoLingo... and judging by the Kickstarter page, he's doing it without their permission. He's going to manually copy the entire DuoLingo sentence database into the app... isn't that a little illegal...? He seems to think he's found a way round it by using "similar" sentences instead of identical ones, but he's still got to copy the entire database in order to create a lookup. I think he's setting himself up for an almighty whacking lawsuit. He's presumably already had some kind of lawyer's letter about it, so I can't understand why he hasn't ditched the project. In five days, the Kickstarter campaign ends, and as he's already hit the funding target, that means he'll have legal obligations to his backers that I just don't think he can legally fulfil -- and how can he refund the money if DuoLingo get awarded damages by the courts?
I intensely dislike as well when people try to tweak a common term/concept a little and then give it a new name, claiming "IT'S A WHOLE NEW THING!." As you said, it is a matter of integrity, failing to give credit where credit is due, and exaggerating a minimal contribution to existing knowledge. Most knowledge is added to incrementally, adding to the work of those who have gone before. As to the legality of his project, I'm no lawyer, but I wonder if the source(s) of Duolingo's database is an out for him, as in did they pull from copyright-free sources without further processing of their own. If that is the case, and he merely violates their terms of service to create an intermediary work product, then maybe Duolingo will have a hard time stopping him. One has to wonder why he didn't just do it with his own money over time, i.e. copy the database (could hire someone cheap on a freelance site to do it), and then process it. The end result would have the look and feel of Duolingo's database, but again that might not be an issue depending on where they got it and how unique Duolingo's interface is.
I'm no lawyer myself, but several jurisdictions have already affirmed the existence of "database rights" that fall outside of the classical model of copyright. Copying someone's collection wholesale is just not on. Even if this isn't the case in the jurisdiction in which he's based, by going via Kickstarter, he's effectively been selling through all of Kickstarter's international subsidiaries, and therefore trading in multiple jurisdictions. And besides, he'd have to know where DL got their sentences to make that argument in court.
Maybe he is just counting on Duolingo to not be willing to foot the bill for legal costs past a couple attorney letters. Does DL not have their own such app? If they offer the same product then there wouldn't be as much of a demand for Ness' product anyway. Competition may be cheaper than legal routes. The cheapest legal way for DL though might be to send a takedown notice to Ness' IP/server provider.
The first place for a takedown would be the iTunes appstore, and he also runs the risk of getting prevented from publishing other apps in the future...
