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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 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!
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).
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.
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."
not quite, government minion of big corporation made police do it. your government is under control of big corporations.
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.
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.
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,
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I think you will find that most people realize that they have rights and object to the idea that individual liberties should be subservient to the rights of corporations.
Of course most non-enthusiasts won't realize what interesting things are being kept from them due to corporate lobbying.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Except that your "criminals" are doing a free public service out of love for the media, and you victims are wealthy beyond anyone's belief, and own the 'police' that they use to raid the 'criminals'...
It hasn't happened yet, but even US law makers (notoriously stupid), have begun to recognize that penalties against those doing financial profit crimes (various forms of piracy, especially those related to 'intellectual property', (where the property is really, all in your head -- aka imaginary property), are we overblown and not especially effective against those who are not doing the, "so-called", crime for profit and have no where near the assets the laws were designed to counter.
What you end up with are fans put in prison for 2-5 years where they become embittered and educated as criminals by the criminal colleges (prisons), and are later released into society with double or triple motive to engage in future economic crimes against society that won't just hurt those "wealthy beyond belief". (Note -- their double motive comes from the fact that because they will have a record, they will find it hard to earn a normal income legally; up to triple is being educated in ways to take society to the cleaners and being taught the moral lesson that the rich make the rules to serve them and democracy is mostly a sham.