Speakeasy wrote:Hypothesis 2
Simon & Schuster does monitor the discussions on this forum; new member “Pimsleur” is a legitimate representant of the holder of the copyright to the Pimsleur materials. This discussion thread should be taken as a very serious lesson as to publisher’s willingness to defend its legitimate business interests. We should all familiarize ourselves with the “Forum Rules” pertaining to “Copyright violations” and heed them. This was “for real” up to, and including, the punchline.
Using my special administrator powers, I'm pretty sure that the "Pimsleur" account is actually somebody from Pimsleur's editorial offices.
Speakeasy wrote:It ended badly when someone, real or imagined, jumped in with a reminder that we’re all being watched ... all the time.
Speakeasy, you
are being watched, all the time.
Pimsleur wrote:Unfortunately, the courses you purchased are unauthorized. We do not have any resellers that sell our courses at such a steep discount. These fraudulent sellers will often throw in out-of-print editions such as Spanish Plus or French Plus as additional incentives.
Unfortunately, I can confirm that fraudulent Pimsleur courses have been a problem over the years. Back on the old site, I remember having to ban a spammer who appeared to be selling illegally-produced copies of out-of-date Pimsleur courses for moderately high prices. It was
extremely shady. Unfortunately, it was quite a while ago, and I don't have any of the details anymore.
As rdearman points out, we do have published forum rules on copyright. In nutshell: Please don't use this forum for distributing copyrighted materials without permission, and don't play wink-nudge games—they don't fool anybody. First of all, rdearman hates getting letters from lawyers. But also (though I can't speak specifically about Pimsleur), a lot of the best courses out there are produced by individuals (a few of them senior members here on this forum) or by pretty small businesses that are just barely hanging on. I very selfishly desire for these publishers to stay in business and keep making courses.
For those people looking for affordable courses:
I do know that many public libraries in the US carry Pimsleur courses, or can get them via interlibrary loan. The consensus of people who have tried Pimsleur on the forum is that it's a solid, audio-based drill course that
will produce results (which is more than I can say for certain other expensive, well-known publishers). However, if your budget is limited and your library can't help, there are also some excellent courses from other publishers in the US$60 range. Or if you really like drills, the FSI courses are in the public domain and available for free download.