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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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
Not exactly true either. They can sue without of the evidence of infringement if they're so inclined. They'll lose if the evidence is against them, but they'll still put a heavy financial burden on the party they'll sue. If Disney thinks they can bankrupt the defendant, and it's worth the cost, then they can sue with practically no standing.
That's why corporate ownership of copyright is a financially asymmetrical and unfair legal allowance. The richest media companies can buy up whatever properties they want and then tie up smaller parties in a civil suit subsequently incurring disproportionate expense on the defendant. They can then offer a settlement deal, and give the smaller party a cheaper option than winning in court. If Disney loses in court, it's objective is still realized by the bankruptcy of the defendant. If the defendant instead settles, they promise to censor their work irrespective of whether or not the work was infringing. If Disney wins, it gets to expand the scope of its intellectual property and bankrupt the defendant. Its a no-lose situation for Disney if the value of the defendant's property is equal to or greater than court costs.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you