A student who ran a site which enabled the download of a million movie and TV show subtitle files has been found guilty of copyright infringement offenses. Despite it being acknowledged that the 25-year-old made no money from the three-year-old operation, prosecutors demanded a jail sentence. After struggling due to a lack of case law, in the end the court settle on a fine.
In 2008 a trend was set by launching real-time torrent search engines. These sites became quite popular as they were able to search the well trusted torrent sources in real-time. Now, a few years later the idea has been picked up again, and used for another download related project; subtitles. BitTorrent users often try and [...]
ALIS, Israel’s answer to the MPAA, has moved aggressively against a site which provides translated subtitles for movies and TV shows. Three individuals who work to provide free subtitles on Qsubs, one of Israel’s most prominent subtitle providers, have been ordered by ALIS to pay $264,000 each in damages and issue a public apology.
Once thought to be operating well under the radar, recent months have seen fresh efforts to silence sites that provide fan-created translations of movies and TV shows for their home countries. The latest targets for shutdown – Israel and France.
This week many sites offering homemade Greek subtitles received legal threats from an organization representing the TV and movie industries. Very quickly, fansub sites closed down or removed access to subtitles, leaving thousands of Greek file-sharers quite literally in a position of not understanding what is going on.
A site specializing in creating video subtitling for the benefit of foreign and deaf Internet users has been closed due to the threat of legal action. WikiSubtitles received a cease and desist from the Anti-Piracy Federation (FAP) and is now offline pending legal advice.
Do you want a subtitle with that torrent? Then Opensubtitles.org is probably the place to be. The website is only a couple of months old, but already one of the most popular subtitle resources.
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