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.
