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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, 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.
So that a company in another country can't, for example, take the novel you wrote, translate it and not pay you a cent.
Movies and music are NOT free. Get that through your head. You might find it convenient to freely stream a flick some conglomerate of investors sank $100 million to produce. No matter how you rationalize what you're doing you're taking for free what someone spent money to produce and is trying to sell.
The fundamentals will not change. Not thinking a movie is worth of your $10 is not an excuse. Thinking the lead actor is an untalented douche is not an excuse. Hating the producer is not an excuse. Your convenience is not an excuse. You are not entitled to free shit and you are not a delicate unique little snowflake.
They aren't hosting movies, they are transcribing movies into subtitles, if anything, they are making the movies more desirable by making them available in many more languages.
Aside from the obvious benefit for those that want to watch a movie filmed in a language they don't speak, I also found it useful to add subtitles to movies I already own. When my wife's Japanese speaking family came to visit from Japan, I was able to find subtitle files that matched up with some titles that I owned on DVD. I had to adjust the timing a bit to get them to match up, but it opened up a lot of movie possibilities that wouldn't otherwise be available. Few movies sold in the USA are subtitled in Japanese (though I did find a few Japanese movies on Netflix that are subtitled in English). I did see some movies on Amazon.jp that were English with Japanese subtitles, but since I lack a region-2 or multiregion DVD player, the movie industry has made it impossible for me to view them.
I've already paid for the movie and its content for personal viewing, so it's hard for the movie industry to say that someone translating from English->Japanese is stealing their creative work.
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.