Language commons/letter1

Dear Farideh Khalatbaree,

Thank you for answering my enquiry positively.

I'm a singer and also a teacher, working in a school for children from 3 to 18 years of age.

For these children I would like to have tools, which allow them to get a feeling of the different languages spoken on earth.

For a privately run project this is a too big task, so I decided to try to create such a tool publicly on the internet, possibly in cooperation with other schools around the world, which could collectively use this work for similar purposes. Most of the people I asked for support like the idea, so I do have confidence, that this project will work out well.

You have asked me, what I would exactly expect from you. I kindly ask you for a written permission to use the text of the book "I, the moon and the star" licensed by the

"Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution License", described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

This license allows anyone to use the text at his/her own will, if he/she shares the work (and also derivatives, that means translations or recordings) with the same license and keeps a pointer to the copyright holder. The holder are you.

Your permission would allow me to cooperate with others freely on the internet, creating translations and recordings, which will be freely available for all users of the internet, licensed with the same license.

These "others" would include you. You would be able to use the derivative works freely to your own needs, publishing translated books or books with extra multilingual material, on CDs or supplemental paper printouts.

The copyright on the artwork in the book would not be touched by this agreement. For example nobody would be allowed to publish a book with your artwork and a different language text.

But anybody would be able to publish the translations, without the artwork.

I found your book by browsing through the books available at http://www.icdlbooks.org

I am especially looking for books fitting these expectations: a) they should be quite short, with a lot of artwork and only little text b) it should tell a story which is universally interesting to children c) the artwork should tell a big amount of the story

An ideal sample, I feel, is "The very hungry caterpillar" by Eric Carle. Unfortunately this is a top selling cartoon book for children. I have asked permission to use its text, obviously without success.

I would be glad, if you knew/told me about other stories / artwork, which would fit my needs described above. I am certainly open to answer further questions at any time. Looking forward to hearing from you soon

Sincerely yours,

Thomas Kalka