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Polish Fans Held By Police For Movie Translations
michuk writes "Nine people involved in a community portal Napisy.org were held for questioning by the Polish police forces this Wednesday. They will be probably be accused of publishing illegal translations of foreign movies (which is forbidden by Polish copyright law). Napisy.org website was shut down immediately afterwards by the German forces (since the servers were located in Germany). The service was the most popular Polish on-line portal where users were free to submit translated subtitles for popular movies. 'According to Polish copyright law any "processing" of others' content including translating is prohibited without permission. The people held (aged 20 - 30) were questioned on Wednesday and Thursday and then allowed to leave. In case of being accused of illegal publishing of copyrighted material, they can spend in jail up to 2 years (in the worst case).'"
If it is illegal to translate, the Polish police was right in arresting the guilty.
Rather than blaming them, the law needs to be changed.
On the surface there's not much to the story, but look a little deeper.
They were releasing translated subtitle files to be used with videos. Presumably, since they needed translating, these were foreign discs. Possibly imported, sure, but the implication is likely that people need these subs to enjoy material not released by the media cartels for that region, and therefore instigates piracy: the favorite bogeyman.
Of course, since the big companies couldn't be bothered to translate it and release it in that region they're not losing any money at all and piracy wouldn't have any impact. UNLESS they want to keep the options open and release localized version later.
Now we're in "region coding" territory. A technique the industry uses for no technical reasons* other than to lock customers in to buying movies at the maximum prices possible.
These weren't people making knockoff translations and selling them in the face of Polish-localized content. This was simply providing a service so people could expand their horizons a little.
I suppose Babelfish is illegal in Poland, too. Ha-rumph.
* one could argue that the content could be mastered for differences in NTSC/PAL timings and color spaces, but I'd say this if the content player can output in varied formats, the technical limitation is gone.
More Twoson than Cupertino
In the USA you get less jail time for phyiscally beating someone and taking their copyrighted material than publishing copyrighted material.
2 years? For the equivalent of making closed caption files?
I am always reminded of the rules applicable to Commonwealth of Virginia employees when I was one.
An employee could be fired for one instance of a level 3 offense immediately. It took more than one level 2 offense to be fired.
Punching one's boss was a level 2. Sleeping on the job was a level 3.
Sleeping while driving a bus might be worse than punching a boss, but most of the time this seemed upside-down and backwards to me.
Admittedly, I don't know much about the process of DVD subtitling, but I was under the impression that these were files distributed separately from the DVD rip. If that's all the site was supplying, isn't this akin to allowing the distribution of emulators but not the beloved ROM images associated with them?
Sigs are for suckers.
the impact of the internet is that it turns what were previously audiences into publishers. now everyone is a bertelsmann or a metro goldwyn mayer, in their living room or den or study. the same sort of power dynamics was at work over the creation of the printing press: fedualism depended in part on the ignorance of the serfs, the inability to read. when they were freed form this ignorance due to the sudden cheap and wide availability of the printed word, all sorts of political dynamics changed, fomenting revolutions and evolutions i think that are still playing out in the world over 500 years later
well the internet frees people from being tied to distribution channels. and as with the printing press, there is an entrenched power that is losing because of this. of course movies, music, etc. is not going away because of the internet. but how movies and music are made and distribtued and how they make money is very definitely going to change, and there are real losers because of this. big (currently rich powerful, not for long) losers
but the internet was originally designed to route around damage in the event of nuclear war. compared to that, the "damage" that entrenched media interests will exert on the net is paltry, and easily routed around
there's no putting this genie back in the bottle
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The ideas of copyright and patents have grown into this thing we call IP. I've mentioned this dozens of times now, but it is the simple truth.
IP laws have been about control of information and not profit for at least 25 years. Simple profit motives tell you that region encoding is not a bright idea. If someone wants to pay to import a disk, have it translated, etc. they will still be in the market for a nicely done local language version. You could potentially make two sales, or one sale if you never would bother localizing the product. Region encoding stops that. Why?
Control. If information can be commoditized it can have rights "attached" to it. That means transaction regarding information you posses must be approved. Approval means cash. It's far more lucrative in the long-term to own the ideas in your book, and not own the rights to copy that book. If you own the ideas, you have control not only over distribution, but over book reviews, derivative works, viewership (5 people in your home theater? Tickets please), crappy approximated renditions on your out-of-tune guitar, or anything else the owner wants. They can even restrict you from the information entirely if they want.
This has not been about control of copy, but of control of information.
I have had the displeasure of living in Poland for the last four years. What you need to understand is that all foreign films/series released to VHS, DVD, and TV are dubbed into Polish BY ONE MAN. Yes, that's right. One guy does ALL the voices for ALL the actors in EVERY movie! If it is decided that a certain film will not be dubbed (and there are many of these), there will never be the possibility of watching this film by Polish-speaking people, unless they speak English. In the large cities, finding someone who speaks English is becoming easier as capitalism takes over, but let me add that when I arrived here four years ago, absolutely no one spoke English! I had to visit the local university's English department to find any. So in order to bring the people of Poland classics like Twin Peaks, and a whole slew of Hollywood and non-Hollywood films, there's a group that focuses on writing subtitles to these films and series. It's basically something anyone can contribute to, and it's just like the Polish police to shut it down.
Every good thing that happens in this country gets shut down. It's completely hypocritical and they are targeting the wrong people. I live in a city of around 700 000 inhabitants and there are eight copy shops within 500 metres in any direction of my flat (I don't even live in the centre). I can go out to any of these copy shops and have a copyrighted textbook photocopied for about 3 cents (US) a page. Some copy shops even keep a library of texts that one can look through and order. Anything you want you can get, whatever subjects you're studying. One guy even has a website where you can order copied books beforehand, pay by credit card, and pick them up at your leisure! Most of the students here in Poland have never owned a real textbook, everyone buys photocopies. While it's true that many Polish students live off of less than 100$US a month (the average salary here is about 300$US a month or 5zl an hour so their parents don't have much to give them), the copy shops are making their living off of copyright infringement. Any day of the week, one can also go down to a special market and purchase bootlegged DVDs, CDs, software, and games. The police don't do much about these people, either.
In order to combat book photocopying, the government started a tax on all photocopies of 3gr a page (about 1 cent US). Now all photocopies are about 4 cents a page, and the tax goes not to the publishers or companies being infringed upon, but to the government. I think it's something like the tax the Canadian government puts on blank computer media. I think it's ridiculous. In typical Polish style, rather than identify the problem and deal with it, they do something completely stupid. For two years after I moved here, there was dog shit all over the pavement/sidewalks wherever people walked. You had to really look where you were going, because you would step in it. Rather than teach people to curb their dogs, or give fines for not picking up after animals, they hired people to go around every morning and clean the sidewalks of dog shit! They need to think about their labour laws and how much people are being paid (in an EU country, no less!), but instead they worry about some young people doing the people of Poland a service by writing subtitles for those who don't know English (or Turkish, or Greek, or Hindi).