Thanks to Misha(and always fabrice and resolve), there is now a plugin that will allow us to move our RevTK data over to anki, and more or less keep the current review schedule.

http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/Plugins

It uses RevTK export to excell option here:

http://kanji.koohii.com/status/export.php

and Anki's sample deck.

If you havent used Ankis sample deck, it is hyperlinked with this site, so that when you click on a keyword, it goes straight to your story!

I dont think anki is necessarily better than this site for RTK, but after finishing RTK1, I was still trying to move kanji to the last stack will doing sentences with Anki. I basically moved to anki since I found myself more and more away from the computer and reivewing via keita. Also, It just seemed to make sense to combined all reviews into Anki.

Im sure there are others that will find this plug in useful.


One issue is it currently wont import RTK3 data. Fabrices spread sheet handles has the data, but there isnt a sample deck in Anki yet. According to resovle if we can get a CSV file for RTK3, it can be implimented.

On a related side note, there is also another plug in for anki called "Additional information for each kanji"
When one hovers over the kanji with the mouse cursor, it will display any info desired. I asked the Author of the plug in if it could handle Heisig meanings:

> I wonder if it is possible to have theat plug in modified so that the
one
> unique meaning per kanji is the Heisig meaning?

If you have a list of kanji and their respective Heisig meanings, then
yes, you can produce a kanji_info.txt file that contains just this
info.

I haven't played with it( and I don't have a txt file either), but it would seem to be very useful to be able to hover over Kanji compounds and get the heisig English, in cases where you forgot them

Again, thanks to all involved!

Added it and it works like a charm. Great job to all involved.

I have added a kanji_info.txt with the rtk1 meanings (English, German, French and Spanish) to the anki plugins page.

Cool! Thanks a lot.
Have you tried the plug in yet?　How does it work?

zazen666 Wrote:Have you tried the plug in yet?

I don't need it. I don't use this webpage for review, but only to store my stories.

I've uploaded a newer version of the import plugin. It's a bit less dodgy than the previous one.

Main difference is that you now start the import through a GUI menu, instead of it happening on every deck open.

It should work with RTK3 once there is an RTK3 deck for Anki. If I get some time this weekend, I might make one.

Let me know if there are any undocumented features I should be aware of.

xaarg Wrote:I have added a kanji_info.txt with the rtk1 meanings (English, German, French and Spanish) to the anki plugins page.

If this is made available to everyone, then this strikes me as a blatant abuse of copyrights. Have you or resolve asked and received from the copyright holders the permission to include and distribute these lists in the Anki project? If not, read this post here. What applies to RevTK and RevTK external scripts applies to Anki and its plugins as well, I reckon.

woelpad Wrote:What applies to RevTK and RevTK external scripts applies to Anki and its plugins as well, I reckon.

I don't think this is the case. This web page can easily replace the RtK books. Therefor you can not claim fair use for the copyrighted keywords.

This plugin on the other hand only displays the RtK keywords if you hover your mouse over a kanji. So the plugin is only useful to people that already own the book and know the Rtk meanings of the kanjis. It has no negative effect on the value of the books. For this reason I believe that distributing a list specifically for this plugin is fair use under the us copyright law.

As the keywords themselves for all 4 languages can be easily obtained by downloading the legal KanjiGym light from http://www.kanjigym.de, the impact of this plugin is relatively small.

Okay sorry if this is a dumb question, but this "move schedule data to Anki" thing doesn't move the stories at all, right? To access those would one have to log in to RevTK?

samusam Wrote:Okay sorry if this is a dumb question, but this "move schedule data to Anki" thing doesn't move the stories at all, right? To access those would one have to log in to RevTK?

That's right.

samusam Wrote:Okay sorry if this is a dumb question, but this "move schedule data to Anki" thing doesn't move the stories at all, right? To access those would one have to log in to RevTK?

But the anki deck does have a hyper link directly to your stories, if you have them stored on this site.

xaarg Wrote:So the plugin is only useful to people that already own the book and know the Rtk meanings of the kanjis.

Fair enough. But once the data is available as a list, it's a small step to convert that list into a deck (small enough that anyone could do it), which would make Anki a competitor much the same way as RevTK for reviewing Heisig keywords in other languages.

xaarg Wrote:As the keywords themselves for all 4 languages can be easily obtained by downloading the legal KanjiGym light from http://www.kanjigym.de, the impact of this plugin is relatively small.

Your second argument however is that this list is already available. Did the copyright holders shoot themselves in the foot by allowing the release of this free software, if indeed they want to protect the usage of the keywords themselves in other products? I wonder...

woelpad Wrote:Fair enough. But once the data is available as a list, it's a small step to convert that list into a deck.

They would still need the missing frame numbers and stroke counts. There would also be no stories or a direction on how to make them. The list itself is not useful and must be combined with various other informations to recreate something like the Rtk books.

woelpad Wrote:Your second argument however is that this list is already available. Did the copyright holders shoot themselves in the foot by allowing the release of this free software, if indeed they want to protect the usage of the keywords themselves in other products?

Yes, thats what I believe. It's just as easy to extract the keywords from KanjiGym. Therefore there is no harm in the list I published in the Anki wiki. Heisig (or whoever) would need to prove in court, that this list could somehow harm the sales of the books, to reject this as fair use.

xaarg Wrote:They would still need the missing frame numbers and stroke counts.

In a glance, but correct me if I'm wrong, the list seems to be in Heisig order, in which case the frame numbers can be easily derived. The stroke count is not a part of the method AFAIK. KanjiGym Light does not provide directions to make stories and still needed to obtain a license (unless the license was required for the full KanjiGym only?).

I'll download KGL to check in what form they stored the keywords. Perhaps it's indeed a simple text file.

woelpad Wrote:I'll download KGL to check in what form they stored the keywords. Perhaps it's indeed a simple text file.

I don't see how the form the knowledge is stored affects copyright. Whether it's stored in a plain text file for all to see, or obfuscated/encrypted, the creator of the work holds the copyright to it unless he explicitly releases the work into the public domain. It seems this has not happened with RTK1, in any language.

Thus the copyright on translations of the book "Remembering the Kanji 1" into non-English languages belongs to the companies that published the books. Redistributing the book in any form -- paper, digital, tattooed on the back of your head -- is breach of copyright, and those companies could, in theory, come after you.

Using Heisig's keywords in a language other than English isn't necessarily breach of copyright, however. An English-German bilingual could easily take Heisig's English keywords and translate them into German. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the result that person achieves would be similar to the official German translation of RTK 1.

The above hinges on the assumption that using Heisig's keywords in English isn't breach of copyright. That point could be argued either way. Copyright today is an ugly beast that has outgrown its original intents and purposes, and dealing with it in a serious way generally requires a legal team and a pool of cash to keep them going.

Whether or not it is breach of copyright, many dictionaries include references to the Heisig index (WWWDIC, for instance) and keyword. Whereas they acknowledge the source, this act alone is not enough to avoid breach of copyright. The fact that other people do it doesn't mean it's OK, but illustrates that copyright is something that can be stretched a long way by those willing enough to do so.

This post is getting long, so I choose to end it here.

woelpad Wrote:In a glance, but correct me if I'm wrong, the list seems to be in Heisig order, in which case the frame numbers can be easily derived.

You would need to know the frame numbers to notice this, but fair enough I replaced the file with a new one that doesn't use the Heisig order. I also added the English rtk3 keywords.

woelpad Wrote:KanjiGym Light does not provide directions to make stories and still needed to obtain a license (unless the license was required for the full KanjiGym only?).

There is no full KanjiGym. The light version is the only one that exists. You also don't need a license. Well, KanjiGym includes animated stroke orders for most kanji, so if you know how to make stories, how to use a SRS and have a list of the non-kanji primitives, the book is not needed.

woelpad Wrote:I'll download KGL to check in what form they stored the keywords. Perhaps it's indeed a simple text file.

ADMIN: I'm removing the measly details there were here about the KanjiGym Light file containing the german RtK keywords, so that our pal Lars Grunswald, developer on Kanji Gym Light, can sleep tight tonight and have sweet dreams about copyright fairies and such.

I have notified xaarg that I removed the offending 3 lines of text here, and also forwarded him a copy of Lars Grunswald's complaint, along with a copy of a previous complaint from Robert Rauther, author of the german translation of RtK, so that xaarg can see the full picture.

I would like to point out also, that by editing xaarg's post, I do not in any way admit to beng responsible or even answerable at all to Lars's email complaint. He said he didn't even contact the author yet or the publishing house. In fact it's very possible that I am legally completely unanswerable to his demand, but like I said, I have better things to do than wrestle emails with them. I have forwarded the email addresses of Robert Rauther and Lars Grunswald to xaarg though, so he can contact them if he wishes to.

misha Wrote:I don't see how the form the knowledge is stored affects copyright. Whether it's stored in a plain text file for all to see, or obfuscated/encrypted, the creator of the work holds the copyright to it unless he explicitly releases the work into the public domain. It seems this has not happened with RTK1, in any language.

Nobody is arguing that Heisig or somebody else lost the copyright to the books, but in the USA you can use other people's copyrighted work without their authorization if specific criteria are meet. This is called fair use.

If Heisig released all the keywords with a free tool, he can not claim, that somebody would misuse my list to get the benefits of the book without buying it, but this would be required to argue against fair use in court.

misha Wrote:Thus the copyright on translations of the book "Remembering the Kanji 1" into non-English languages belongs to the companies that published the books. Redistributing the book in any form -- paper, digital, tattooed on the back of your head -- is breach of copyright, and those companies could, in theory, come after you.

That's not true. Copyright does not grant such absolute powers. They might still try to come after you, but there is a good chance, that they will lose in court.

misha Wrote:Using Heisig's keywords in a language other than English isn't necessarily breach of copyright, however. An English-German bilingual could easily take Heisig's English keywords and translate them into German. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the result that person achieves would be similar to the official German translation of RTK 1.

That's wrong. Translating copyrighted work does not create your own independent work. This translation would have a shared copyright between you and the owner of the original work.

misha Wrote:Whether or not it is breach of copyright, many dictionaries include references to the Heisig index (WWWDIC, for instance) and keyword. Whereas they acknowledge the source, this act alone is not enough to avoid breach of copyright.

This is fair use. Heisig can use not copyright to disallow people to make references to his work.

xaarg Wrote:You would need to know the frame numbers to notice this, but fair enough I replaced the file with a new one that doesn't use the Heisig order. I also added the English rtk3 keywords.

I doubt that is necessary, as it would be trivial to deduce the frame numbers using WWWDIC or similar tool anyway.

xaarg Wrote:

misha Wrote:Redistributing the book in any form -- paper, digital, tattooed on the back of your head -- is breach of copyright, and those companies could, in theory, come after you.

That's not true. Copyright does not grant such absolute powers. They might still try to come after you, but there is a good chance, that they will lose in court.

Are you trying to say that redistributing a copyrighted work is not breach of copyright? I have a feeling that we weren't on the same page here.

xaarg Wrote:

misha Wrote:Using Heisig's keywords in a language other than English isn't necessarily breach of copyright, however. An English-German bilingual could easily take Heisig's English keywords and translate them into German. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the result that person achieves would be similar to the official German translation of RTK 1.

That's wrong. Translating copyrighted work does not create your own independent work. This translation would have a shared copyright between you and the owner of the original work.

Although I agree with your point about translating copyrighted works, I think you've missed my point here. I wasn't referring to the translation of the copyrighted work itself. I was referring to the individual keywords. My point was that if it's OK for English speakers to refer to 愛 as "love" in English, then I think that it's OK for a German speaker to refer to it as "Liebe".

I don't see what makes the English keywords so special compared to non-English keywords. Am I perhaps missing some crucial detail?

misha Wrote:I doubt that is necessary, as it would be trivial to deduce the frame numbers using WWWDIC or similar tool anyway.

Better be safe than sorry. A person with enough evil intent can just google for "Remembering the Kanji" to find a few page, where you can download all the books for free, but linking to such a page is still illegal in a few countries.

misha Wrote:Are you trying to say that redistributing a copyrighted work is not breach of copyright? I have a feeling that we weren't on the same page here.

Yes, it is no always a breach of copyright. You can create a parody of Heisig's book, which would allow you to use parts of them for this purpose. You can add Heisig's index numbers to a kanji lexicon. You can quote parts of his work to praise or to criticize him. There are a lot of situations, where you can use other people's copyrighted works, especially if you don't try to make money.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

misha Wrote:Although I agree with your point about translating copyrighted works, I think you've missed my point here. I wasn't referring to the translation of the copyrighted work itself. I was referring to the individual keywords. My point was that if it's OK for English speakers to refer to 愛 as "love" in English, then I think that it's OK for a German speaker to refer to it as "Liebe".

Yes, the translation for a single word is not protected by copyright law, but a list of such translations can be. You can lookup phone numbers in your phone book (and redistribute this number), you can lookup a translations in your dictionary (and use it in a text), but you can not copy a phone book or a directory and sell them to other people (without getting into trouble).

misha Wrote:I don't see what makes the English keywords so special compared to non-English keywords. Am I perhaps missing some crucial detail?

I never claimed the English keywords were special. This page is allowed to use them, because Heisig allowed it.

xaarg Wrote:

misha Wrote:Are you trying to say that redistributing a copyrighted work is not breach of copyright? I have a feeling that we weren't on the same page here.

Yes, it is no always a breach of copyright. You can create a parody of Heisig's book, which would allow you to use parts of them for this purpose. You can add Heisig's index numbers to a kanji lexicon. You can quote parts of his work to praise or to criticize him. There are a lot of situations, where you can use other people's copyrighted works.

"Use" and "redistribution" are two different things. Please read my original sentence.

xaarg Wrote:

misha Wrote:I don't see what makes the English keywords so special compared to non-English keywords. Am I perhaps missing some crucial detail?

I never claimed the English keywords were special.

Oh, that claim wasn't made by you.

woelpad Wrote:If this is made available to everyone, then this strikes me as a blatant abuse of copyrights.

Xaarg, you edit your posts faster than I can reply to them

xaarg Wrote:This page is allowed to use them, because Heisig allowed it.

Last edited by xaarg (12:44 pm)

Ah, that was the piece of information that I was missing. Thank you for clearing that up.

It seems to me that this discussion is no longer relevant to the original topic of this thread. I think it would be appropriate to continue this discussion at a different location.

[ファブリス]

xaarg Wrote:I don't think this is the case. This web page can easily replace the RtK books. Therefor you can not claim fair use for the copyrighted keywords.

This plugin on the other hand only displays the RtK keywords if you hover your mouse over a kanji. So the plugin is only useful to people that already own the book and know the Rtk meanings of the kanjis. It has no negative effect on the value of the books. For this reason I believe that distributing a list specifically for this plugin is fair use under the us copyright law.

For your information, I got permission from James Heisig through direct email to use the english keywords on the website. I clearly stated to him how I wanted to use the keywords and frame numbers, even that the site was to be called "Reviewing the Kanji" as a nod to the book, and that it was not meant in any way to replace the books.

I disagree with your statements, the RevTK website does NOT replace the books.

For starters I've made it clear since the site came online, that Heisig's stories shouldn't be reproduced. Overall members have been very responsible about this.

Secondly, the website provides support only through the forums, and this is run almost entirely by RtK learners themselves. I've rarely seen anyone here recommend to skip the book, and I don't believe this would be a good idea anyway. The method may seem very simple to us in retrospect but it's not all that clear for people new to RtK.

If anything, given some of the email feedback I receive and also on this forum, I am certain that this website is helping selling more RtK books and giving greater coverage and acceptance for the method, and more incentive to try it due to the friendly community here and the support of the site.

But there are some people who don't seem to understand this : our German friends are at it again, getting all sweaty because somebody mentioned the extraction of keywords from KanjiGym Light, I received a mail today :

Lars Grunewaldt Wrote:I'm the lead developer of KanjiGym Lite, and I just stumbled - by mere coincidence - about this quite disturbing thread:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid14047

As you already know, the german author of the translation of RTK is very restrictive about the usage of his work (which is not much different from the french and spanish authors).

The problem in this thread is that one of xaarg's postings even points out how to extract the keywords from KanjiGym Light, which was never intended by either Jim Heisig, nor the Klostermann Verlag (publisher of the german book and KanjiGym Light). If you consider german copyright law, this is a clear breaking of copyright laws (circumventing "encryption").

While it's not a hard to obtain this knowledge for a programmer, I don't think the publishers will like this freely available "hacking guide" (if you want to call it like that), or any supported republishing of the word lists.

(...)

He also mentions :

Quote:Maybe you could also remove the postings about how to decode the KanjiGym database.

I don't know what he's talking about, where is this hacking guide, and where are the detailed instructions to retrieve the German keywords from Kanji Gym Light?
EDIT: I found and removed 3 lines in a post above about some file in KanjiGym Light. Case over as far as I'm concerned.

Frankly I don't feel like being very cooperative this time, especially that this is not related to my website but to the use in an Anki plugin for which I am not responsible.

However in so far as continuing the work on this website is concerned, I have better things to do than wrestle unpleasant emails with these guys. So I would be very grateful if you can edit your posts and remove any of such information listed above so that our friend Lars Grunewaldt can sleep tight tonight, thanks.

I'm going to have to look at this more in detail later, this is just a post to ask you to check this, and help me save some time.

I would like to remind everyone also one more time, that Anki has its own bugtracker and support forum, which is where details about Anki plugin implementations should be discussed. Please see Anki discussion (no bug reports).

If people can copy the keywords from the book (and they do, because most certainly use an SRS), then people can copy the keywords from KanjiGym without my "hacking guide". So I don't care much, if it has been removed, but Lars Grunewaldt's points are not convincing.

ファブリス Wrote:I disagree with your statements, the RevTK website does NOT replace the books.

Using the website without a book doesn't seem to be a smart idea, but it is possible without doing a lot of extra work, so a judge could argue, that using the keywords without authorization on this page is a violation of the law. That was my whole point. I believe, just like you, that having this website increases sales of the book.

Lars Grunewaldt Wrote:If you consider german copyright law, this is a clear breaking of copyright laws (circumventing "encryption").

Please read ? 95d UrhG. Your program is not protected, because you did not mark it as having copy protection. There is also ? 95a Abs. 2. You don't use encryption, but only store the content in a silly way. This scheme is not effective and therefore not protected by the law. Last but not least this is a German law valid only in Germany and is not part of the international treaties for copyright protection.

Lars Grunewaldt Wrote:While it's not a hard to obtain this knowledge for a programmer, I don't think the publishers will like this freely available "hacking guide" (if you want to call it like that), or any supported republishing of the word lists.

What they like or what they don't like does not matter that much. German law does not ban publishing descriptions to circumvent copyright protection, but only programs and similar tools. Again it won't affect a website that is not based in Germany.

I kindof regret creating this post...its gone way off track and created a lot of headaches, (sorry ファブリス)......

I imagine the original poster was just trying to help, and I can't imagine anyone thinking they could avoid buying the book if they had that list. But like Fabrice, I'm not too keen on the idea of receiving threating emails, so I have removed the link from the wiki. Strike another blow against fair use.

[ファブリス]

Ditto, and no problem xaarg & zazen666.