Slashdot Mirror
Police, Copyright Industry Raid Movie Subtitle Fansite
Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge reports that a fansite providing subtitles for movies has been raided by Swedish police at the behest of the copyright industry.
"The movie subtitle fansite undertexter.se, literally meaning subtitles.se, is a site where people contribute their own translations of movies. This lets people who aren't good at the original language of a movie or cartoon put those fan-made subtitles – fansubs – on top of the movie or cartoon. Fansubbing is a thriving culture which usually provides better-than-professional subtitles for new episodes with less than 24 hours of turnaround (whereas the providers of the original cartoon or movie can easily take six months or more). What’s remarkable about this raid is that the copyright industry has decided to do a full-out raid against something that is entirely fan-made. It underscores the general sentiment of the copyright monopoly not protecting the creator of artwork, but protecting the big distribution monopolies, no matter who actually created the art."
Sure there is some copyright issues with translatins, but seriously, fuck the copyright holders, and the middle-men, in this case. And, of course, fuck the police.
What the industry needs to do instead of this sort of bullshit, is to contract with the fansubbers, and pay them for their work. The fansubbers provider a much quicker turn around on translations and subs, and are doing it for the love of the work. What better way to make yourself look even better, than to not just tolerate, but to pay!?
The fansubbers allow people to watch the media who would otherwise not be able to (due to not understanding the language). That's great. I wish them well.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
The copyright industry may have decided to ask the police to do a raid on it. The police are the ones who decide to do the raid.
I don't see how it's "entirely fan-made". Under current law, a translation of an audiovisual work's original script into another language is a derivative work.
Yet more proof that copyrights are NOT good for the public. They are only good for big media and other sociopathic entities with deep pockets.
Sadly, you do require the copyright holder's permission to create one...which is sad if the creator of the original work chooses not to authorize it in your language. I can see both sides of this, but there should be a loophole for non-commercial works. There's no way the studio can show economic losses, and the derivative work is valueless in and of itself (without the original film).
Under current law, a translation of an audiovisual work's original script into another language is a derivative work.
Surely I can't be the only one who finds such a law to fall under the category of "royally fucked?"
Other than being an aspect of the profit-protection racket, what possible, legitimate reason would there be for that kind of legislation?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Sure, but the actual point of it all is that you already have the film (so you've paid). One more example of copyright law getting it completely wrong.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Just because it's law, doesn't make it right.
So that a company in another country can't, for example, take the novel you wrote, translate it and not pay you a cent.
To answer your question, what legitimate use can there be for custom subtitles for movies which have not yet been released to the public ..
I think that part of their motivation to attack such a site is that people using these subtitles are likely to be using them with pirated versions of the shows/movies. You can select your own subtitle file on many media players for the show you downloaded, however, things you are watching on TV/Blu-ray/Betamax do not usually have the option to overlay custom subtitle files.
Mind you, this just lends more credence to the argument that legitimately purchased versions are often worse than pirated ones because they lack such functionality.
"We apologize for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked."
and this (and lots of other things) makes sense
"don't inconvenience those with more power than you" is the whole of the law
all of civilization is just a thin wrapper around this one simple truth
in this case the media/copyright holders have the power of money and influence, the are colluding with those who in government who have the power of the gun
the people running the website are inconveniencing the media companies because the website is chipping away at the media companies' illusion of control
the people in "law enforcement" are happy to comply because most individuals who are attracted to that profession are sadists who gain pleasure from exercising power over other people. They are also cowards because they are too scared to exercise power without the anonymity and "legitimacy" provided by the profession
just remember the one true law and everything becomes clear
Such activity using taxpayer-funded police on behalf of corrupt industries is not in the interests of humanity, education, or techno-social development.
In December of 2001, RaiUno (an Italian television network) showed a John Wayne "western" film. When John Wayne`s character asked how much the haul from the train robbery was, the dubbed answer came back, "venti-cinque euro".
At that point i realised that the system of dubbing (with oversight and modification by various Information Ministries/ Propaganda ministries) is why countries which do not have subtitled original versions aired tend to have a lesser command of English. For example, the Dutch (all foreign films are original audio with Dutch subtitles) can discern between Queen`s English and american English, whereas Italians generally lack understanding.
In many cases, the "official" translations/subtitles are either sub-standard, doctored/modified, or otherwise fail to communicate the design of the scriptwriters.
These pompous ACTA-SOPA hollywood sheisters and their indentured giovernment law enforcement are an assault on, and an insult to, 21st century intellect; they must be stopped.
Officers tasked with enforcement of ACTA-SOPA are actually competent enought to track down massive financial fraudsters, corrupt bankers, and other complex fraudsters who use computers and newtorks to launder and avoid taxation of their money, but unfortunately their training and potential for catching the "bad guys" gets diverted to the detriment of knowledge-based society.
What is Ceasar`s, but a pizzeria.
The end result of this will be to destroy copyright. I give it 10 years.
You may have a point for things like books. But this is certainly not a case for movie subtitles. How many people do you know who will skip seeing a movie just because they have the subtitles? Even deaf people will want to see the visuals.
The translation is a derivative work applies to any creative work. Would you find it acceptable that a translation of a GFDL or CC licensed work was not considered a derivative work? If not, why should it being a movie script make any difference?
As a native English speaker living in Thailand for a few years, I can offer a prospective from this side of the earth. Legalities aside, the native Thai movies have English subtitles during the first run in the theater. However, when the movies are released on DVD, they do not have the English subtitles. They used to have them, lets say 5 years ago, but because of piracy of (Thai) movies abroad (read: Malaysia), they no longer distribute DVDs with the English subtitles. On a 'blockbuster' release, the distribution rights for other outside of Thailand will be picked up by some company, which will usually include the English subtitles, as well as the native languages for whereever it being distributed. As a consumer here, that means if I wish to watch a normal Thai movie here, I better see it in the theater, because nobody will pick up the distribution, hence, there won't be a DVD release with English subtitles. As far as the raids go, I can see why the entertainment industry doesn't like fan subs, at least from this angle. What I don't necessarily see is why they have enough pull to make raids like this happen.
Cinemas wanting to provide subtitles in languages the studios would never care about? Maybe unlikely but certainly possible.
Non sequitur - nowhere in TFS or TFA is it stated that the fan-subs were made for illegally pirated movies.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I fail to see the relevance of your post. No one said anything about someone skipping the movie because of a fansub. Te point is that the translations of all creative works are derivative. Why should a movie script be exempt other than because of the Slashdot groupthink hatred of movie companies? What exactly is different between a book and a movie script?
+1 funny. Yeah just like how the Pirate Bay is only used for Linux ISOs and public domain media?
Sure, but the actual point of it all is that you already have the film (so you've paid). One more example of copyright law getting it completely wrong.
Totally wrong. If you have the disc how do you think you can mux in fan subs? The people using these are torrenters, not those that just bought a disc. Yes, there are ways to rip, transcode and remux, but be honest, we all know these subs are for pirated videos.
I don't see how it's "entirely fan-made". Under current law, a translation of an audiovisual work's original script into another language is a derivative work.
Perhaps true, but actually preposterous. I can invent a contrived language that maps the dialog of one movie directly into the dialog of another movie (at least if there are only two speakers).
Because the translated script by itself is not useful. There is no reason to pirate subtitles alone, so there's no need for those to be protected too. If I download fan-made subtitles, I still need to get the movie for them to be useful. It's the AUDIOVISUAL part which contains the entertainment utility (and deserving of some protection).
A book is different because it is solely the words themselves that contain the entertainment utility.
It is derivative. But translations by themselves are worthy of copyright protection as well. If you are one of those people who only care about the letter of the law and not the spirit of a law you neither much of a citizen nor much of a human being.
Along with UK veto'd the discussion of NSA spying without informing their population, wiretapped Russia, and we know what they did with Assange and Pirate Bay. From a country that used to be proud of its defense of human rights the path to the bottom was pretty fast.
Or are you trying to apply corrupt US law onto Sweden ? There was similiar case in Poland (napisy.org) few years ago. Police raided site administrator and some folks who did actual translation. Then it tool 6 years for prosecutor to determine that those translations were actually legal because it was voice->text translation, not text->text, so it did not constitute derivative work. Yet prosecutors did everything in their power to prolong this case, so it took 6 years to close this case. From copyright cartel point of view it is mission accomplished: napisy.org is still defunct. Falkvinge is right that we truly have two-tiered justice system worldwide. It is totally corrupt, yet as long as people still get their daily fox-news-style crap-propaganda, everyone is apathetic enough to just get along with whatever fraud our corporate overlords instigate on us.
No, the actual point is that subtitles are derivative works - which require permission from the holders of the copyright to create. Which is an example of copyright getting it exactly right. You aren't allowed to muck with someone else's work without their permission. That's the whole point of copyright,
What's a newtork, and how does one use it? I'm imagining a very brutish newt, carrying a large club.
> I fail to see the relevance of your post.
Of course not. You're too much of a corporate toadie.
His post was an obvious prelude to a fair use defense. Fansubbing does not devalue the work. It is not piracy in any meaningful sense of the word. It's merely end users managing to find some way of making a particular creative work more useful.
This "derivative" also can't be used without the original.
Copyright related monopoly powers should be minimized rather than maximized as a matter of basic public policy and because that's what the copyright clause in the US Constitution indicates.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"It underscores the general sentiment of the copyright monopoly not protecting the creator of artwork, but protecting the big distribution monopolies, no matter who actually created the art."
I'm not sure that outside of small bubble of people who don't believe in copyright at all (let alone understand the concept that others have rights in the first place), that such sentiment is general.
No. We don't all know.
You are just being a huge asshole and just declaring everyone to be thieves with nothing to back that up except your own stupidity and total lack of morals.
You are simply projecting. YOU are the dishonest scum and you are projecting that on the rest of us.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually, I'd imagine they're more concerns about such subs being used in 0-day TPB releases.
Cut off the subtitles, and sudden the movies are a lot less interesting to download. Of course, there may not be any official copy with localized subtitles either, but the industry doesn't care about that.
> You aren't allowed to muck with someone else's work without their permission. That's the whole point of copyright,
No it isn't.
The whole point of copyright is that we do have something to muck with. Copyright exists to foster what you would describe as piracy. It is not a virtual land grab. That's just corporate propaganda.
No. The whole point of copyright is piracy.
The corporations have just distorted things.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Of course not. You're too much of a corporate toadie.
Name calling. The realm of those with no legitimate argument.
His post was an obvious prelude to a fair use defense.
Then it's a pretty poor one. Fair Use has never covered distributing to others the translation of a creative work in any country. Creating the translation for your own use would be.
Fansubbing does not devalue the work.
And who exactly made the argument it did? Oh right, no one.
It is not piracy in any meaningful sense of the word.
No one called it piracy.
It's merely end users managing to find some way of making a particular creative work more useful.
Great but distribution of such a work is not fair use.
Copyright related monopoly powers should be minimized rather than maximized as a matter of basic public policy and because that's what the copyright clause in the US Constitution indicates.
I agree, but then it should be applied to all things not just movie scripts. My point was that there was a double standard being used without justification simply because it involved the movie industry.
Please correct me if I am wrong on this - fans translate movie dialogue to something easily understood in a different language and load it up to a website where others can associate it with a purchased movie. Because more people can now understand the dialogue, more movies are sold. The industry, citing copyright infringement, raids the site and shuts them down. Now fewer people have the appetite to buy their movies because they do not understand what is being said. Good, sound business logic. Sounds like they are trying to do what the music industry did - disenfranchise its customer base and lose revenue in the process.
How does the fact the law calls it a derivative work negate the fact it is "entirely fan-made"? You statement makes no sense (nor does the modding up you got).
I really hope that applies to movie scenes as well. Because I saw a movie where the plot was something along the lines of a girl being captured and some guy went ahead and rescued her. Yesterday I saw a movie that COPIED this plot! How is this not derivative work? Where are the lawsuits?
Fansubs are derivative works. It may be illegal to put a derivative works into commercial use without the consent of the original copyright holder - e.g. Polish translation of Finnegans Wake spent some years on a shelf, because the Joyce estate sued everyone into submission until the copyright expired. On the other side a Polish funsub site napisy.org was raided and closed in 2010, but in May this year the case was dropped, AFAIR with phrases like 'fair use' and 'no commercial usage' in the air.
I'm pretty interesting what's how does the Swedish legal soup on this look like.
NO! The whole point of copyright is to PROMOTE science and art. It EXPECTS people to "muck" with the work of another. That is how art advances. It is perfectly legal to MUCK with a work. Please read up on what a PARODY is.
its a fair maiden on a chain; to be used to do the washing down the river, and trained as bait for suckers like Eliot Spitzer...
Next time i shall be sure to kill that unauthorized "msspellcheck" process..... haha, typo, thats "networks", and yes, the ACTA/SOPA law enfarcement heirarchy has diverted skilled IT cops from chasing down the bad-bankers (and tax-evading,coke-snorting hollywood bosses), to stifling knowledge and criminalising youths.
yeah but fansubs are a community of people who have more time than money and they allow more people to enjoy the artwork, and in the case of anime it can resurect anime from the dead and give it new life, and are supposed to stop sharing when the official usa launch is announced. basically fansubs are unpaid critics of anime and do a better job letting their community know which anime to buy when it hits. fansubs are not restricted to the anime fans, and there are torrenters who ignore the 'until usa launch' but in general fansub communities are a good thing for most studios, the movies tolerated fan subs because nobody wanted to be the first to be making enemies among vocal fans of their products. but technically yes, fansubs are 'piracy' of content. but if you want to mention it, everything from tapes, cds, radios, dvds, blurays, vhs, betamax, tivo, piratebay etc all make piracy easy, which is why copyright is an epic fail. everything the customer wants to do with the technology is 'bad' and there is no way to stop someone from learning how to get access if they are determined not to pay. how much of microsofts user base use pirating tools? who made the most money off this? how much overlap in technology is there between 'real' users vs piracy? it is not easy.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
We should also close down this road-network of ours, criminals are using it to flee the crimescenes!!!!
the usa is communist
it's much easier and shorter
Totally wrong. If you have the disc how do you think you can mux in fan subs? The people using these are torrenters, not those that just bought a disc. Yes, there are ways to rip, transcode and remux, but be honest, we all know these subs are for pirated videos.
Fansubbing long predates torrents, or the Internet having the bandwidth (to the typical house) needed for video. Fansubbing was done for years with a Xeroxed typed sheet (or later emailed or posted text), and you were mostly on your own to match up the lines of translation to the spoken lines. I remember watching anime at cons while reading along on the translation I was handed.
That bein said, it was also extremely common to pass out copies of the video tape of the anime at those cons, but usually that would stop when the video could be bought in America.
Am I weird in that I ripped my entire DVD library, stuck all the DVDs in boxes, and only watch the digital copies anymore? I suspect that's not so strange among the sort of geek who would have a use for a fansub track in the first place. And adding a new subtitle track to an existing rip can be easily scripted to a single command.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Because the translated script by itself is not useful.
While in itself that's a correct statement, to the movie industry it is a problem in that it breaks their region code.
The region code is there to enable the movie industry to sell the same move for big bucks in the west and sell it far cheaper elsewhere, thus increasing profits. The fear I suppose is that this would allow people to buy a cheap Chinese version of a movie (or download it in english) and then apply subtitles in their desired tongue for free, thus cutting industry revenue.
I really don't care about this anymore. Fine, call me a thief. If downloading things, which I think is fine, is thievery, then breaking into someones house maybe is right too. I think I'll start doing that. Blame those who equated these two things, not me.
You're wrong. I BUY Japanese movies that aren't available in the US, and use fan subs because I don't speak Japanese.
False equivalence. The vast majority of the users of the roads are not criminals. It's easily shown that around 80-90% of the content on the Pirate Bay is violating copyrights.
You aren't allowed to muck with someone else's work without their permission. That's the whole point of copyright,
The whole point of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". At least in America, creative control was never the legal basis for copyright, the basis was to benefit the public by encouraging new works.
The common view now has become much more attribution oriented. People expect their Youtube video to stay up as long as they clearly identify the original work and it's creator, and get angry if they do that and their derivative work gets taken down. The law is just lagging the changing tide of expectations around copyright in our democracy.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Fair use factors. It's a less substantial portion of the work as a whole, it's for a non-profit- purpose that increases accessibiliy.
Heh, I've had experience with commercial film companies and fansubs.
A few years back, I had too much time on my hands, and an itch to watch certain foreign movies that (then) had no publicly available English translation. Not to be outdone just because I was monolingual, I downloaded the films themselves from the internet, downloaded subtitles for *other* languages (French, Spanish and Portuguese) and proceeeded to convert the subtitles into English, using a mixture of google translate, perl, online dictionaries, hand-editing and mass rewatching of parts of the film, until I got something that looked roughly right to me, at the time. It took a pile of time, but as I say, I had too much time on my hands.
When I was done I finally got to watch the film, then uploaded the files to some subtitle database on the internet in case others found it helpful, which apparently a few people did. No matter that what I did had a lot of wrong bits (the hardest part is catching local idioms, which aren't well-documented, even on a place as comprehensive as the internet).
Fast forward a few years, and I spot DVD versions of one of these films on Amazon complete with English subtitles and buy it instantly. Finally, I'll get to see the film with properly translated subtitles, rather than some botch job by someone who didn't know what they were doing. And, of course, it turned out that the Korean company that packaged the DVD had just downloaded my subtitles from the internet, made some small alterations and slapped them on the DVD itself (sadly, not correcting the most obvious mistakes I'd made).
Seems some of these film companies will happily take free fan labour (however shoddy!) and sell it on to paying customers without acknowledgement or royalty*, while others will send in jackbooted thugs to have you sent to jail. Such is life.
*I'm not miffed about my work being used like this - I'm just embarrassed at the terrible job I did and hope the customers aren't upset by it!
Some of the Japanese subtitling efforts are AMAZINGLY detailed. I've seen a few that are almost overkill since they cover 3/4 or more of the screen and in some cases require slow-mo or pausing of the video to even have a chance of reading them all.
Having actually watched both DVD release and Fansubbed versions back to back, the caliber of 90 percent of commercially subbed Anime is subpar. In some cases it's even worse if you've read the original subbed manga/light novels, and find out the Commercial subs of the Anime give entirely the opposite impression of what is supposed to be going on.
Exactly, you wouldn't want that. Which is why US publishers have always respected the copyright of UK publishers and paid them for their work. Oh, no wait, they didn't. In the 19th century, US publishers routinely republished UK titles without paying royalties. Only when US culture came to dominate the global market did they join in international copyright protection rackets^W schemes.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Because I will of course pay the same amount for an English movie, with English speakers, speaking English in the movie as I would for a badly dubbed Chinese version of the movie with translated English subtitles.
How do you remember to breath all the time?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
yeah but fansubs are a community of people who have more time than money and they allow more people to enjoy the artwork, and in the case of anime it can resurect anime from the dead and give it new life, and are supposed to stop sharing when the official usa launch is announced. basically fansubs are unpaid critics of anime and do a better job letting their community know which anime to buy when it hits. fansubs are not restricted to the anime fans, and there are torrenters who ignore the 'until usa launch' but in general fansub communities are a good thing for most studios, the movies tolerated fan subs because nobody wanted to be the first to be making enemies among vocal fans of their products. but technically yes, fansubs are 'piracy' of content. but if you want to mention it, everything from tapes, cds, radios, dvds, blurays, vhs, betamax, tivo, piratebay etc all make piracy easy, which is why copyright is an epic fail. everything the customer wants to do with the technology is 'bad' and there is no way to stop someone from learning how to get access if they are determined not to pay. how much of microsofts user base use pirating tools? who made the most money off this? how much overlap in technology is there between 'real' users vs piracy? it is not easy.
I'm not sure anime is the best example to use. Over the last 15 years there have been quite a few bankruptcies of US distributors, as well as Japanese labels that now refuse to sell the rights for localization outright.
If a company is failing to serve a market, they should lose copyright in that market. Use it or lose it, but you cant lock up culture.
Good-bye
True, all works are derivative. But not all works are derivative of something that is still in copyright. If you want to (by way of completely random example) do a translation of Les Miserables and then make an english-language musical out of it, there's nobody to stop you because the original source is long out of copyright.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
I wish i had mod points.
Good-bye
That's text to text translation, that is a derivative work. However a voice to text translation is not necessarily in the same category. An Italian translation of a book written in, say, German, is intended to replace that book for those more comfortable in Italian - most people would buy one or the other, not both. Italian subtitles to a German movie, however, are useless without the original movie. It's not a translation of any text anyone would ever actually read, rather it's more like a cheat-sheet for viewers of the original film who do not understand the original language. It doesnt compete against the original work, but adds to the value in it.
For this reason, at least in some countries, subtitles are NOT considered derivative works.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
A week or two ago, a bunch of countries signed an treaty that allowed for publishing materials for the disabled.
So now various groups like HathiTrust (who won their lawsuit by The Authors Guild) can now share their work with groups from other countries. Unfortunately, the treaty had been modified to exclude audio visual works.
It might be that individual countries still have laws that apply (eg, the US does, but they still might not've been in full compliance), but we don't yet have an international treaty for doing it. My suggestion would be to host the website in Antigua.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
;(
It's something the producers can sell. In the case of alternate language subtitles, they can extract funds from distribution channels and segment the market. Can't do that if everyone buys the region 1 version and adds their own.
Have gnu, will travel.
when "the art of war" is translated for the Nth time who's permissions are required?
How does a "translation" of a book from 2 BC become copyright protected especially when there are already multiple "translations" done?
Copyright get that one right?
Especially when that very industry is known for "Hollywood accounting" to ensure no one gets paid.
How much taxes does Hollywood pay (percent of income, not raw numbers). When i lived in the US i paid around 32% of my income in US taxes.
I suppose they are like Apple? Pays almost no taxes (as a percent of its income) but yet expects top tier enforcement of copyright laws to protect its business model?
How can i have the public police system prop up my business model?
Man, if only the horse and buggy guys had this level of protection they might still be in business.
The point of copyright is piracy? What the hell are you smoking? If you are gonna make such a bold comment, then maybe you better come off a little more clear with what you mean. I can't connect getting a copyright so that corps can pirate stuff. DOES. NOT. COMPUTE.
Fair use does not factor in. Distributing translations of movies has never fallen under a fair use provision in any country that has a fair use exception.
I can invent a contrived language that maps the dialog of one movie directly into the dialog of another movie (at least if there are only two speakers).
Perhaps true, but actually preposterous.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Well, it's not "entirely fan-made." The person who made it based their translation on the dialogue of the movie.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
So, Sweden cooperates with the U.S? Remember folks, Sweden is the same country that wants Julian Assange. What are the odds that they will extradite him to their overlords in the U.S at the first opportunity.
I can invent a contrived language that maps the dialog of one movie directly into the dialog of another movie (at least if there are only two speakers).
Not getting it...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
So movie fans are working for free, ... and the vendor is complaining. Obviously the fans should counter-sue for the value their labour added to some mega-corp's merchandise.
Let's be practical here. The dialogue achieves very little by itself. It's not a screenplay; the listener can't read the story because sub-titles provide limited narration.
I thought the whole point of copyright was to provide an incentive to people create more by preventing others from profiting off of it.
So, based on what you've said, translations shouldn't be allowed before the film has been released? Okay, I may disagree with it (I think you've entirely ignored legitimate uses that precede a public release while glossing over the fact that public releases oftentimes happen during the theatrical release these days; Amazon Instant Streaming has a number of titles that are currently in theater, for instance), but I can at least see the logic behind it. What about the other 98.6% of films though?* What legitimate reason is there for outlawing translations of them?
A translation of a book replaces the need for a copy of the original, but not so with translations of films, since you still need a copy of the original film, and if someone wants to pirate that copy, that's already a crime. Taking down a site that publishes translations is as silly as taking down a publisher that prints study guides for books: the derivative work cannot exist independently of the original, and in no way facilitates piracy. I actually think I used this particular site a few months back when I was ripping my entire library of blu-rays and DVDs so that I could watch them from my Apple TV and ran into a few discs that had subtitle formats my ripper couldn't recognize or my encoder couldn't use.
* I didn't just pull 98.6% out of my ass. See this 2010 estimation that there were approximately 172,000 total films, then add about another 15,000 to account for the three years since then (which is a conservative estimation, considering the MPAA's reported numbers (see the bottom of page 20) for the last few years have skyrocketed, and we can likely expect that to be true elsewhere as well). If we then assume a rather generous-for-your-side delay of 6 months on average between a movie's theatrical and public releases, we can say that there are about 2500 films at any given time that have not yet been released, which means that about 98.6% have already been released.
Someone should point out the Dark Side of the Rainbow project, and let the appropriate industry titans sue each other into oblivion.
Who's infringing?
Some of the greatest literary works known to man are scripts.
Sure Hangover part IV isn't Shakespeare but that doesn't mean scripts in themselves aren't an art form worth protecting.
A clause such as "copyright shall include the exclusive right to exploit the work by making copies of it and by making it available to the public, be it in the original or an altered manner, in translation or adaptation, in another literary or artistic form, or in another technical manner" does not make "translation [...] a copyright owner's exclusive right", any more than it makes reading a copyright owner's exclusive right.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
"You aren't allowed to muck with someone else's work without their permission. That's the whole point of copyright."
It's hard to be more wrong. Parody is explicitly protected under fair use rights.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
I guess "criminals raided by police on behest of victims" isn't really a news story, huh?
FIGHT THE POWER, Slashdot. Get us that free entertainment we so richly deserve!
For this reason, at least in some countries, subtitles are NOT considered derivative works.
Which countries might those be?
I imagine that the majority of these fansubs are not intended as transformative comments on a particular work but instead as faithful reproductions of the original work's meaning.
Please define "progress". Some people might define "progress" as the publication of more distinct works, including works that are created only because the author had an assurance of creative control.
An adaptation is a work based on another work. Because it's a work, it deserves its own copyright, but because it's based on another work, it requires permission from the author of the older work unless the original work was created before 1923 (the perpetual copyright cutoff). As for a permissively licensed modern-language translation of the Christian Bible, you could always try the World English Bible.
Explain to me how this is a case of parody, and I'll consider it.
It may be legal to raid the subtitle site, but it ain't right. Legal != right
Now try getting 51 percent of the public in each affected country to 1. agree that current law is not right, and 2. agree that this discrepancy between current law and what is right is more important than other domestic and foreign policy issues.
Translations have their own copyright. If commercial copyright studios make a translation later, they better not look too much like the 24-hour-after-broadcast fan translations, or they ar violating the copyright of the original fan-translation. However, there is a copyright on the original storyline and script. It just may or may not be that that copyright has a higher status than an "original" translation. The kicker here is that they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Either it's an original work of art and it has it's own copyright, or it's a "dumb" translation of the original and all copyrights on translations are null and void.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Copyright's purpose is to bribe the creative with an incentive to create and not keep it to themselves or to those who pay an arm and a leg.
The intended result is a finite amount of time for copyright holders to monopolize their creations for profit, but still allow those creations to enter the public domain eventually.
Unfortunately, that wasn't enough for the greedy content producers, who coopted the democratic process and bought laws to extend that limit indefinitely.
Hell, the public domain isn't even sacred anymore, since SCOTUS allowed Congress to retroactively claw back stuff that had ALREADY entered the public domain. So don't kid yourself into thinking SCOTUS is here to protect us.
Makes sense to me. The purpose of copyright is twofold: first, to incentivize authors to create and publish works which they otherwise would not have created and published; and also to place those works into the public domain, so that they're the most useful to the public, as fully and quickly as possible.
Remember, what was said was:
You aren't allowed to muck with someone else's work without their permission.
Copyright exists to foster what you would describe as piracy.
Which is to say, copyright has as a goal placing as many works as possible, as quickly and fully as possible, in the public domain, so that they can be mucked about with, without anyone's permission.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
In the US fair use is basically a tautology: a fair use is an otherwise infringing use which is fair under the circumstances. Any use might be fair, but not every use will be. There is no rule that all quotes or all educational uses or all time shifting is fair, you see. Each individual use must be analyzed anew and will depend on the circumstances in the case at hand.
So all fan translation and subtitling of movies isn't a fair use because it's too generic. A specific instance of a specific fan translating and subtitling a movie, under just the right circumstances, however, could be fair.
The previous poster was referencing some of those factors, so it seems that be knows more about fair use in the US than you do.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Bribery keeps the guard dogs on leashes held tight by their corporate string pulled puppets.
Such a contrived language that has such dependency on the movies in question would probably qualify as a derived work of both.
The common view now has become much more attribution oriented. People expect their Youtube video to stay up as long as they clearly identify the original work and it's creator, and get angry if they do that and their derivative work gets taken down. The law is just lagging the changing tide of expectations around copyright in our democracy.
Pretty much this.
There is so much music available now that it's doubtful if you even can listen through it all in a lifetime. Clearly there is no longer a need to promote creation of new music without requiring a certain quality.
I suspect that the time it would take to watch all movies/tv-series at least exceeds the reasonable spare time a person have in their life time.
Copyright have served its purpose in the sense it was originally meant. If we still are going to keep it it would make sense to rewrite so that it encourages diversity and/or quality and/or availability.
Perhaps copyright should be limited to non-commercial work?
My life is just fine and I do not watch a single god damn movie. And I never will until the poor are allowed back in theaters.
Name calling. The realm of those with no legitimate argument.
Non sequitur. The mere fact that he used an insult does not mean he has no legitimate arguments.
I don't see how saying that "copyright shall include the exclusive right to exploit the work [...] by making it available to the public, [...] in translation" isn't the same as saying that making and distributing a "translation is a copyright owner's exclusive right."
And they deserved to go bankrupt. What they were selling in the US was nothing like the original. They cut half out, change rice to donuts, and dumb it down for the 4-12 demographic to sell stupid merchandise.
If I've built up excellent karma through a series of insightful, informative, on-topic posts, I shouldn't have all of that negated by a single post that happens not to please the mods that day. It is designed that way to prevent abuses of the system... for example, so that someone's karma doesn't get obliterated by a few abusive mods who happen to disagree with my opinion on one single post. Yeah, I know that meta-moderation is supposed to reduce this possibility, but really, I know better than that...
Now, if I choose to continuously spout off with a series of flamebait or off topic posts, I deserve the karma hit that will inevitably result.
Yes, it is.
No, ignorant jackasses like yourself have distorted things - because you not only have no fecking clue what you're talking about, you've swallowed the bullshit, lies, and propaganda of equally ignorant people wholesale.
I don't see how it's "entirely fan-made". Under current law, a translation of an audiovisual work's original script into another language is a derivative work.
At what point... lets take something famous... "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn"... at what point does copyright kick in? Maybe the whole thing? part of it? maybe "Frankly my dear, I don't give a"? or maybe "Frankly my dear?" or how about "Frankly"? What about if i changed it to "Honestly my dear, I don't give a damn"
Thee is a concept in copyright called nonliteral copying. If enough of the preceding conversation matches concept for concept that the passage ends up being a close paraphrase, any clause meaning "I honestly don't care" might infringe. Individual ideas are not subject to copyright so much as their selection and arrangement. Otherwise, one could get away with rewriting a best-selling novel in simplified language and calling it one's own original children's book.
So that a company in another country can't, for example, take the novel you wrote, translate it and not pay you a cent.
You are missing the point of subs.
This is like having Opera performance done in Italian and someone then translates the spoken Italian to English or German or whatever. Then when you *buy* the original performance DVD with Italian (so you can *view* and *listen* to performance), you can then load up your subtitles for Englisn or German or whatever, and know WTF they are singing about.
Or put it another way, this is aking of a company taking the novel you wrote, translating it, and makes it available and usable to all the people that bought the original untranslated copy in the first place. They make it available to larger audience, without additional fee to the original publisher.
That's the point of subs. So you can buy a Japanese drama, or Vietnamese film or Russian movie and then know WTF they are talking about without learning the language.
Taking out fansubs is as stupid as it gets. Anime got any popularity (and hence *sales*) in US only because of fansubs of Japanese broadcasts. But oh well, nothing like cutting off your nose to spite the face.
Totally wrong. If you have the disc how do you think you can mux in fan subs? The people using these are torrenters, not those that just bought a disc. Yes, there are ways to rip, transcode and remux, but be honest, we all know these subs are for pirated videos.
step 1) insert movie into your PC's optical drive
step 2) open movie in your preferred media player
step 3) add subtitles from disk
step 4) watch your movie with subtitles.
am i the only one that finds regional pricing an issue? :p
that they can outsource everything to wherever they want to get the lowest price, is great and fantastic and logical, that a customer would be allowed to do the same thing would be horrible, and we must prevent it at all cost.
I would accept regional locking, if that meant that the product was also made in my region, but if they outsource everything to the cheapest country, then i want to right to buy it there dirtcheap
Totally wrong. If you have the disc how do you think you can mux in fan subs? The people using these are torrenters, not those that just bought a disc. Yes, there are ways to rip, transcode and remux, but be honest, we all know these subs are for pirated videos.
Are you kidding? Ever heard of VLC? You can play DVD or video files and use any subtitles you want.
I had to read many scripts in English class. An excruciating exercise, honestly (scripts aren't meant to be read, they're meant to be performed!).
Fact is, scripts are in themselves useful. Not to you or me, but to some crazy nuts out there it has entertainment value. I guess they just perform it in their head or something.
One-time-pad-language?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Just FYI: I stopped reading your post as soo as I saw "creative" used as a noun. Very poor word choice if your audience is either geeks or artists.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Ever get so damn sick of the slimeballs in Positions of Power that you actually puke? I'd never heard of such a thing before, until now. I only wish their heads had been in the bowl...