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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."
Woah there... Who said anything about pirating? If you wanted to watch a movie you bought that was not in a language you can understand, wouldn't you want subtitles?
And it's not only about language barriers but also about the disabled. If I were them I'd look up to see if there's any laws about making works accessible to the deaf. There's laws about government websites in the USA, surely there's a loophole somewhere about deaf people and movies.
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bullshit...
"Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: ...
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;"
They didn't grant them the right to create this derivative work.
One of the many ways that "intellectual property" is a fucking lie.
Woah there... Who said anything about pirating? If you wanted to watch a movie you bought that was not in a language you can understand, wouldn't you want subtitles?
Yes, but in many cases it is cheaper to buy an english only version of a movie than one with local subtitles. The MPAA want to preserve this charging of countries other than the US more money for the same crap.
Just because this makes sense does not really make it right though. I think they missed the point here as in many cases the user contributed subtitles are better than the original subtitles they provide as they often contain local slang that only someone who can swear well in both languages can make. They should have let this stand as all it had was text which without a copy of the video and sound would be pretty useless.
Interestingly, beyond that, I don't think this raid would even be legal in the US. The fans are creating commentary on the original work; they are not creating a derivative. They do not have access to the screenplays or the commercial subtitle scripts -- so everything they write is purely commentary on the movie, which just happens to be able to sync up with the actual video/audio. The fact that the studios eventually offer a similar product for sale is neither here nor there -- they have no copyright claim over the subtitles.
The same argument could be used for music lyrics, but I think intent would be much more important here, as people are trying to re-create the songwriter's lyric sheet, which is not what's happening with movies and subs.
If this still doesn't fly in court, the answer is easy: add in extra commentary that is obviously not derived from the original content in any way other thaat it is a fan's reaction to it.
Of course, this all assumes you live in the US -- the laws the US shoved down on the rest of the world are likely more draconian and don't have the appropriate fair use exemptions. Anyone in Sweden care to educate us as to whether this is the case?
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!
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.
That's one way of looking at it. The other way is that there are other derivatives of Les Miserables which _are_ under copyright, and the people who own them would like to have a few words with you about exactly what you have created a derivative work of.
This happens a lot with Disney, as they have used many public domain or out-of-copyright works as sources for their movies, and then sue if there is another work that might possibly in some way be confused with the Disney work.
They can sue if they can show that your work is a derivative of the Disney work, which is itself now a new copyrighted work. For example, if your animated feature of The Hunchback of Notre Dame happens to have three singing gargoyles, a cute, lovable little Quasimodo, a noble, heroic Phoebus, and a crappy happy ending where the boy gets the girl and they all live happily ever after, you might have a problem. But if your movie has a hulking, ugly, monstrous Quasimodo who dumps molten lead on the invading army, a vain and shallow Phoebus who loses interest in Esmeralda after sex doesn't work out, and everybody dies at the end, you should be good to go. Even if your Quasimodo cries "Sanctuary!" three times while triumphantly displaying an unconscious Esmeralda---an element common to the book and the crappy Disney movie---you're fine. You are free to copy the original. You aren't free to copy the copy.
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