Since I was involved in some part of this story, I can give some information. About 11-12 years ago, there was a dictionary on DOS written by someone I don't exactly remember his name. There wasn't any copy right involved, as long as I remember. I decoded the data and extracted it. That was based on Arianpour. Then I modified data and corrected it as much as I could. Masood Hashemi was our expert programmer in FoxPro. So, he wrote a dictionary using FoxPro and I provided the data. A copy of this dictionary should still be available. I am not sure, but I guess this is the data Masood used for his online dictionary.
For the dictionary on SchoolNet, I don't know what happened when I left Computing Centre of Sharif Univ more three years ago. It is possible they have used the same data.
Best -khanban-
Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
Hi again list,
I am forwarding response I got from Dr Pedram Safari which seems to be hosting Massoud Hashemi's dictionary. Please CC him in replies.
I would reply in a few days with a conclusion on the thread after we read other peoples opinions. Perhaps those friends in Iran that have access to Aryanpour hardcopy can spend a few minutes to confirm that the dictionary at http://www.math.columbia.edu/~safari/dictionary/ contains the Aryanpour data. You can do this by randomly selecting a few words (10) and confirm that the meaning matches word by word in it's order and eveything.
Roozbeh, can you please explain the Iranian copyright laws one more time?
Thanks behdad
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 04:53:31 -0500 From: Pedram Safari <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Behdad Esfahbod <behdad> Subject: Re: English-Persian dictionary on your site
Dear Behdad Esfahbod,
Thank you for your interest in the English-Persian dictionary on my homepage. Let me first tell you that I am not aware of the copyright status of the dictionary, I am just hosting Masood's program. I am also not aware of the inquiry you are talking about. But I can tell you a few facts, if that helps.
First, I know that Masood himself wrote the script that runs the dictionary -- I can testify to that. I do not know how he has obtained the database, if he has entered that himself manually or he has received it from other sources. I also think he had once told me that the data is based on Aryanpour's dictionary, but I was not in a position to verify that, so I preferred not to advertise the dictionary using Aryanpours' popularity.
Next thing I can assure you of is that I personally gave the source file of Masood's program, including the database, to people in the Computing Center of Sharif University of Technology (either to Majid Khanban or to Rouzbeh Pournader). I gave the source files to them based on Masood's permission. They said they wanted to write a php file to better suit their website, which was OK with us.
These are the facts. After a while they put up an English-Persian dictionary (on the schoolnet site, I suppose), without giving Masood any credit. I can think that they have used the database as well, but I can not be sure.
In any case, I guess there is no copyright law being enforced in our country, but I am certainly not in favor of plagiarism, so if you can prove to me that there is a theft involved, I will take necessary action. I am also quite curious about the source of the dictionary on schoolnet.
You may circulate this e-mail to people who might be interested, but on two conditions. To avoid any abuse, no part of this message should be deleted during the circulation and it should go around in its entirety. I should also receive any reply or comment relate to this issue.
Best
Pedram
-- ________________________________________________________________
|| |||| Ali Asghar Khanban || || Research Associate in Department of Computing ||||||| Imperial College London, London SW7 2BZ, U.K. || Tel: +44 (020) 7594 8241 Fax: +1 (509) 694 0599 ||||||| [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~khanban ________________________________________________________________
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