Welcome to fsi.antibozo.net.
An appeal to the originators of fsi-language-courses.org
Recently someone has lodged a claim that these works were not produced by volunteers using materials obtained from the U.S. government, but were derived in some unspecified manner from his commercial version of the FSI courses. In the interest of protecting access to this content, we request that anyone who can document or attest to the provenance of any of the works hosted here please contact us at antibozo [at] gmail [dot] com. In particular, we solicit the help of anyone who performed audio capture or editing and can help us demonstrate that the source materials for these recordings were in fact in the public domain. (To clarify: it is generally accepted that original FSI course materials are in the public domain; this dispute is over whether the specific materials used to prepare the files hosted previously at fsi-language-courses.org, and now here, were derived works with copyright, or were public domain materials, such as cassette tapes purchased from the U.S. government.)
This site hosts public-domain copies of audio and text files for language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which is part of the U.S. Department of State. This content was until recently available from
fsi-language-courses.org, but that site was shut down without explanation in February of 2013. The content hosted here was recovered from a torrent containing a snapshot of fsi-language-courses.org taken some time in the past.
Please note that this site is hosted on a server with limited bandwidth, so users interested in downloading large volumes of this content are invited to use the torrent if they can.
People who contributed to the construction of fsi-language-courses.org are invited to contact us at antibozo [at] gmail [dot] com. We would like to give credit to the people who did the hard work of capturing and editing the files found here. In addition, more recent versions of any of these files would be welcome.
The description from the original fsi-language-courses.org site read as follows, and applies equally to this incarnation:
These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain.
This site is dedicated to making these language courses freely available in an electronic format. This site is not affiliated in any way with any government entity; it is an independent, non-profit effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages. Courses here are made available through the private efforts of individuals who are donating their time and resources to provide quality materials for language learning.
It should be noted that there are businesses who also use FSI course materials as the basis for language training. Some of these businesses have edited and repackaged the materials, and are entitled to copyright protection for their derivative works. We wish to stress that we do not knowingly host any materials in violation of copyright on this web site. Anyone aware of any such violation should contact us so we can take appropriate action. In addition, the materials recovered from the torrent have been scanned for malware using ClamAV but it remains possible that undetected malware is embedded in these files; users are advised to employ appropriate countermeasures before opening files downloaded from this site, especially PDF files.
Finally, we would like to thank Jennifer Wagner of
ielanguages.com, who provided invaluable assistance in locating the materials found here.