As to whether they’d be useful, they could have two area of value
Titles come up quite often in speech (eg “Play [song title] please”)
The titles could often include useful words, improving general coverage.
Some cases won’t be as useful as regular phrases, since titles typically don’t form a full or detailed sentence, but they’d provide variety, would be less likely to have grammatical errors (unlike some of the free form sentences submitted by non-native speakers to common voice) and best of all they would be easy to say - no author wants a title that people can’t get right!
On a practical level, lists are readily available online (eg on Wikipedia or in online databases), saving transcription errors. They’d just need someone to go over, sense check them and cut the more obscure ones (eg with very rare names or made up words) before submitting.
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nukeador
(Rubén Martín [❌ taking a break from Mozilla])
2
As long as we are sure a material is public domain we can use it.
The issues I see about movie or song titles are that they are usually only in English and they just have a few words (not always a complete sentence) which is less engaging for people to read when donating their voice.
@johnycage, not sure I follow. Do you mean a particular tool called “daily newspaper” or are you suggesting this applies to headlines?
I have a feeling that newspaper headlines aren’t likely to be free of copyright restrictions, since they’re not quite the same as the title of a work. In the UK there has been a case suggesting they can be copyright, and there’s a load of discussion here: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=464fb6fb-335b-4286-bb67-f84c4be0747a
It would be great to find a modern current source like that, but it’s important it’s pubic domain.