Authentic language

Howard corrects his stand on storing and retrieving material by electronic means.

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Howard: You can take anything you like off the web, from the BBC, from Gutenberg, from Wikipedia, put into a digital library like Greenstone, with no worries about copyright, and then generate exercises like scrambled sentences, fill in the gaps, image guessing using FLAX.

Question: Are BBC, Gutenberg and Wikipedia all copyright free and open source?

Howard: OK, I didn’t quite mean “anything you like.” There’s a lot of stuff that you can’t, I mean it’s copyright. And I’m not sure how Greenstone handles BBC but books on Gutenberg are classics, out of copyright. Wikipedia articles are classified creative commons.
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Happy birthday

Did you know the song "Happy Birthday" is copyright?

So if you sing it you could be sued?

It's possible.

So if someone asks me "When were you born?" and I answer "Born on the 4th of July" I should pay royalties to Oliver Stone?

That's the direction the law is dragging us.