GitHub requests its users not to use GitHub as a hosting for large binaries. You should probably use Amazon S3 for distributing these files or you can upload them to a Sound Hosting service like SoundCloud.
Turns out Dropbox was a bad choice. The links were disabled for generating too much traffic. The files are now hosted on archive.org and the Github repo has been updated.
I disagree. Dropbox is a very good choice for hosting this content because it was designed to host and share medium to large sized files. As long as you are not using Dropbox as your CDN and get less than a few hundred downloads a day, you should be good.
> According to Dropbox support, public links for free accounts may not use more than 10GB of bandwidth per day while that limit is 250GB per day for paid Dropbox accounts.
OP responded to my post saying they were indeed disabled already. Dropbox is good for sharing with 1 or 2 people but bad for sharing with the general public.
"I do not claim to be the owner of any content related to this course. If you are the rightful owner of this content and wish to have it removed, please contact me (XXXXX@columbia.edu)."
Is this how we ask for permission to use someone else's work in the future? Above all, the YC folks are fast -- I bet you'd get a fast reply from Altman if you were to ask before rehosting the content.
I've been happily listening to, and learning from, the lectures by opening the youtube videos and putting them into a background tab.
>I've been happily listening to, and learning from, the lectures by opening the youtube videos and putting them into a background tab.
That's not exactly the same as just having the audio files though. I've been listening to the lectures on my phone during the train ride to/from work. The reception is really bad, and I have to load the videos at 240p and usually let them buffer for a while. This will be really helpful to me.
I do agree about the asking for permission, but now that sama has commented that it's fine, I'll be downloading this to listen to offline.
Come on, IMO the guy had the right to assume this lectures are made by cool people who won't mind. And if they do, he'll take it down.
He created some value for a few people. Probably wrote a 5-lines-long bash script to download the youtube video, pull the audio out of it, add the mp3 to a repo, commit and push. He's done something nice, so that others won't have to.
You're asking him to ask a few dozen people for permission. Suddenly this becomes a project. And what if one person doesn't see the e-mail, forgets to reply, or it ends up in spam folder? The repo becomes incomplete and far less useful.
I won't use it myself, but I can see why somebody would. When I listen to something on Youtube on my phone and hit the power button to turn off the screen, it pauses the video. It doesn't pause the audio in pretty much any music player app.
This is available officially (and likely more reliably) from their website.
Admittedly they don't show the URL well (only linking to iTunes) - but if you add the following url manually to any Podcast app you can listen to the lectures:
> I do not claim to be the owner of any content related to this course. If you are the rightful owner of this content and wish to have it removed, please contact me (<email omitted>)
It is clear that this github repository is to serve no purpose but a rehost, of a copyrighted content(it is open in a sense that it is freely available, but the copyright still belongs to the PG and so on.). While a mirroring is an acceptable contribution to a freely available content, sometimes even encouraged, I've always figured that an accepted approach is to inquire-then-serve, rather than the opposite.
Another problem is that the disclaimer that is supposedly to protect against claims of infringement, proudly calls for the original owners to action, if in case of infringement. Does this mean that this mirror will stay unless the original author spends effort in hunting down these mirrors?
Judging from the email address, I think the guy's heart was at a right place(just because it is an university address) and just wanted to help sharing the good knowledge. Hopefully the share may be moved to more appropriate way.
What I meant was that if he wanted to mirror, why didn't he send an email first? If there are hundreds of mirrors/rehost of your content, would you have to track down every one of them and contact them yourself?
The disclaimer is essentially claiming for a permission until requested otherwise, and moreover, putting the responsibility to the content owner. If the owner doesn't have time to track down every instance, it's his responsibility.
Of course it doesn't really matter for online contents, but the guy is feigning respect to the content owners; what he's doing is nothing of it.
Here is GitHub's policy : https://help.github.com/articles/distributing-large-binaries...