Tens of thousands of these downloads originate from Poland, where it can take weeks before the episodes air on local TV. This huge interest in unauthorized copies has created a high demand for “pirate subtitles,” a niche which the group Hatak has been serving for years.

Many copyright holders are not happy with these pirate subtitle releases and prefer to shut these sites down. But where others see a threat, the Polish book publisher Wydawnictwo Otwarte (Open Publishing) decided to use this unauthorized distribution channel to its advantage.

The publisher is selling the Polish translation of David Kaplan’s book “Homeland: Carrie’s Run,” which is a prequel to the popular TV-series. In a unique opportunity to appeal directly to thousands of Homeland “pirates,” the publisher teamed up with group Hatak to promote the book.

“We decided to advertise via subtitles because we wanted to show the book to all the fans of the Homeland series in Poland, no matter where they watch the show,” Maciej Migda, Managing Director at Wydawnictwo Otwarte told TorrentFreak.

The publisher explained that they wanted to plug the book in spots where people would see it as useful information instead of an ad. This means that the added text should not interfere with people’s viewing habits.

“We also wanted to inform them about the prequel book in a specific context. When they watch the credits and flashbacks from the Carrie’s past we catch them with the phrase ‘How did it all begin? Let’s read the prequel book,” Migda says.

Below is a screenshot of the subtitle file and how it appears on-screen. In this case during the opening credits the subtitles show the text “How did it start? You will learn from a book prequel “Homeland: Carrie’s Run.”

TorrentFreak spoke to Karol, the Hatak group member who translates Homeland for Polish viewers. He tells us that the cooperation with the publisher is not really an ad, his main motivation is to bring the book to the attention of Homeland fans.

“It’s just information for the ‘Homeland’ fans about the new book, based on Showtime’s hit series. Unfortunately, the book promotion in Poland was really poor, so I thought placing the mention about it in subtitles was in the fans’ best interest.”

The publisher gave Hatak several copies of the Homeland book in return for the promotion, which the group gave away via their Facebook page.

“The publisher gave us a few copies of the book, so we could organize the prize competition on Facebook. In addition, we received a few copies of ‘A Captain’s Duty’ for our Facebook fans, without running an ‘ad’ in the subtitles.”

“I think it’s a really good deal that makes everyone happy and so far I haven’t had any complaints from the users,” Karol notes.

The Polish Homeland subtitles are downloaded by roughly 4,000 people every week, which results in a lot of highly targeted promotion for the book. According to the publisher, Homeland fans appreciated the guerrilla advertising which resulted in at least a few extra sales.

“The responses we got so far tell us that people appreciated the fact that we informed them about the book, and some have bought it,” Migda informs TorrentFreak.

To our knowledge this is the first time that a copyright holder has teamed up with a subtitle group to promote related content. While we don’t expect this type of promotion to become mainstream anytime soon, it is a great example of how unauthorized distribution is able to add value for copyright holders.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

While many people get annoyed when regular file-sharing sites are targeted with legal action, an extra-special level of annoyance is achieved when Hollywood and its proxies decide to shut down sites that offer fan-created subtitles.

Nevertheless, the outrage doesn’t dissuade the studios. After dropping out of the headlines for some months, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN is now back with a campaign against sites offering subtitles. One of the domains targeted is Bierdopje.com, a TV show news site ranked 400th most-popular domain in the Netherlands.

In an announcement yesterday, site operator ‘Sypher’ explained how BREIN had contacted him with threats over the free subtitling services offered by the site’s translators. The anti-piracy group’s lawyers explained that Bierdopje must immediately cease and desist from engaging in “unlawful and illegal” acts or face a lawsuit.

In addition, BREIN also demanded an undisclosed cash payment within a week to cover the costs it had incurred so far, a demand that Sypher describes as “extortion.”

“You guessed it, we simply cannot go up against the legal ravings of this party with delusions of grandeur and overpaid lawyers, and certainly not within the short deadlines they set us,” Sypher says. “We simply don’t have the financial resources to embroil us in such a process.”

Importantly, Bierdopje is not a file-sharing portal offering movies or TV shows and before this contact from BREIN the site had never received a single takedown request from a rightsholder.

“We do no harm and we don’t harm the income of producers. We help people who do not speak the English language, plus the hearing impaired or deaf,” Sypher explains.

“Anyway, many of the series translated by our users do not even come out in the Netherlands,” he adds.

With no sensible or effective way of opposing BREIN, Sypher says that Bierdopje will now remove all references and links to subtitles in addition to suspending the translation and subtitling team and shutting down their IRC channel.

“We very much regret that a private party such as BREIN has grabbed a hobby project like ours around the neck. Furthermore, we understand that this will come as a blow to our users and translators and will create frustration but there is unfortunately nothing we can do,” Sypher concludes.

According to Dutch news site Tweakers, BREIN has sent a similar warning to other sites including SimplyReleases.com, which appears to have shut down its operations.

In July, Swedish police raided the popular subtitling site Undertexter.se, an action that outraged the so-called ‘subbing’ community. Despite the aggression, that site was soon back online and is currently operating business as usual.

Just recently the music industry in the United States also decided to renew its offensive against sites offering text related to entertainment products. During a press event November 11, the National Music Publishers’ Association announced that it had sent cease and desist notices to around 50 sites that offer song lyrics without permission.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Despite the setback, site founder Eugen Archy insisted that Undertexter would be back.

“We will never give up, we live in a free country and Swedish people have every right to publish their own interpretations of a movie or TV show,” he said in a statement.

While all major equipment remains in police hands, Undertexter do have a copy of their most valuable asset – the site’s database. With that – and obviously a server or two – the site hopes to make a grand return, but they say that won’t be possible without assistance from the public.

“We at Undertexter.se have long hesitated about whether to ask for donations because it is not in our nature to associate subtitles with money. We run Undertexter.se voluntarily and have no intentions of getting rich from it,” says Eugen Archy.

“But now we have no other options, we have been told that we will not get our servers or computers back in the coming months. But we obviously have a plan!”

Perhaps unsurprisingly that involves people donating to a fund, but to avoid any question of the site’s operators profiting from the situation, the drive will be overseen by the youth division of the Swedish Pirate Party.

“The Pirate Party’s youth organization (Young Pirate) will have access to Undertexter.se’s bank account and will check that the correct amount has been received. Once that happens donations will be stopped. This is to avoid future speculation that we are here for the money. We just want to save Undertexter.se!” Eugen Archy explains.

Quite how the donation drive will be viewed by the police remains to be seen. Rights Alliance and prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad are absolutely adamant that Undertexter was an illegal site involved in mass copyright infringement. Whether they will try to interrupt the fund-raising will be an issue for the days to come.

However, not everyone believes the legal situation is so clear. Speaking with Metro, Sanna Wolk, an associate professor of civil law at Uppsala University, says important details need to be assessed.

“The core issue is whether the lyrics count as independent works or pure translations. If they follow the script, it’s a copyright violation to distribute them without permission, but if they’re self-published, it is not,” Wolk says.

“It is difficult to say where the exact line is. Subtitles need to be considered on their own merits to make an assessment.”

Countering claims that Undertexter carried some commercial subtitle files, founder Eugen Archy says that on rare occasions that may have happened (as with any user-generated content site) but complaints from rightsholders were never forthcoming.

“We have never received complaints from businesses who have pointed out that some of the subtitles were taken from their DVD – 95% of all translations were written by the users themselves,” he explains.

In any event, copyright expert Sanna Wolk is struggling to understand why the site was targeted.

“Undertexter.se represents a form of Youtube spirit that has evolved into something new. You can not stop it. I do not understand what benefit this kind of process of law making will have in the long run. It costs society a lot of money, generates lots of bad will and means suffering for individuals, Wolk says.

“Industry should instead work on finding new ways to sell. I do not understand why they’re focusing on this, it does not benefit anyone.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

However, an event in the past 24 hours is a step beyond anything seen so far in Sweden, a country that has long-enjoyed the freedom to share files but has increasingly felt pressure from the United States and its powerful Hollywood-based movie companies.

There are plenty of sites online that offer subtitle files so that speakers of any language (and of course the deaf) are able to enjoy watching and understanding movies and TV shows. Many of these carry subtitles ripped from consumer DVDs and Blu-ray discs so it’s perhaps understandable when copyright holders object to their distribution.

However, there are also sites that offer subtitles created by fans. Enthusiasts watch a movie or TV show and set to work translating the dialog and manually transforming it into a text file. These are then offered on sites various indexes around the web.

One such site, Undertexter.se, paid the ultimate price for their subtitle-creation activities when police raided the site yesterday and seized its servers.

“The people who work on the site don’t consider their own interpretation of dialog to be something illegal, especially when we’re handing out these interpretations for free,” says site founder Eugen Archy.

However, the authorities clearly don’t agree and Archy says he knows who pushed them to that conclusion – famous Rättighetsalliansen (Rights Alliance) anti-piracy lawyer Henrik Pontén.

“No Hollywood, you played the wrong card here. We will never give up, we live in a free country and Swedish people have every right to publish their own interpretations of a movie or TV show,” Archy insists.

Needless to say, the Swedish Pirate Party is outraged at the development.

“The copyright industry is increasingly resorting to desperate measures to preserve their outdated business model,” says party leader Anna Troberg.

“Today’s copyright monopoly inhibits creativity and creation in a way that is completely unreasonable. The raid on Undertexter.se is yet more proof that it is time to completely reform copyright law.”

In October 2012 another fan-subtitling controversy raised its head in Scandinavia when it was discovered that Netflix was using subtitles created by fans on DivX Finland for the show Andromeda.

“We have removed the series from Netflix pending the investigation,” Netflix told us at the time. “We are a legitimate service and pay a lot of money for the TV programs and movies on Netflix, including subtitles.”

And there’s the difference.

Users of Undertexter were getting subtitles not only for free, but also in a shorter time frame when compared to official outlets. Upsetting the status quo in this way probably got them raided yesterday.

“More news coming soon greedy Hollywood,” Undertexter’s founder concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Online, subtitles come in the form of small text files that can be quickly downloaded and played alongside a corresponding video file using media players such as VLC.

In many cases the words contained in these files have been created by the movie and TV studios and just like their scripts, are considered valuable intellectual property. In others, however, subtitling enthusiasts will have manually translated English language originals into local tongue, often providing a service that simply isn’t available officially.

A site offering such subtitle files has just got its student owner into legal trouble after growing in popularity and eventually serving up more than a million downloads.

In April this year the site, which TorrentFreak has identified as Norsub.com, put up a notice stating that although they always believed that they had operated legally, they had been ‘informed’ that sharing subtitles online constitutes copyright infringement.

As a result, Norsub said they were choosing “to distance themselves from this activity” by shutting themselves down, but it now transpires that their problems were running a bit deeper than merely being ‘informed’.

According to a report from the South Trøndelag County Court, a student from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim has just faced trial for operating Norsub.

It was claimed that the unnamed 25-year-old had run the site since 2009 and during that time had offered unauthorized subtitles enabling locals to watch thousands of foreign language movie and TV shows.

During the site’s three years online, Norsub is said to have offered subtitles to more than 6,000 productions. Of these the student is said to have personally provided 400. As can be seen from this archive, from aXXo to Z0N3 the site provided subtitles for just about every online release group.

While there have been previous infringement cases in Norway involving other media such as movies, this is the first time a court has heard a case involving subtitles. The judge reportedly had difficulty in comparing movie piracy with sharing subtitles, considering the former to be a much more serious offense.

Running against the student was the fact that he’d operated the site for several years and during that time the site had become very popular. In his favor, he’d shut the site immediately once he realized there was a problem with copyright.

Prosecutors asked the court to hand down a jail sentence, but the judge refused to go that far. Instead, the student was fined 15,000 kroner, roughly $2,500. He is currently investing his time in a completely legal movie information site called Moviie.com.

Although relatively rare, US movie and TV studios have taken legal action against subtitling sites before. The reason they appear to get so annoyed by the existence of these sites is that they allow people abroad to watch movies and TV shows that due to licensing issues haven’t even arrived on their shores yet.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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 find subtitles for the movies and tv-series they download. Finding these subtitles can be tricky as most subtitle websites have their own user base, this means that most subtitles get uploaded to a single source.

This is where Tinysubs.com comes in, it allows you to search the top 36 subtitles sources in real-time, and allows you to filter results in over 60 different languages.

Tinysubs works fast and shows decent results. Their search engine works on a principle that all keywords in your query have to match. The idea behind this is that quality is more important than quantity.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Big Media attacks on those who provide these subtitles have been documented regularly here on TorrentFreak. From WikiSubtitles in Spain, to a broad assault on many outlets in Greece, threats of legal action are commonplace.

Of course, those who rely on translated and home-made subtitles can be very passionate about the enjoyment they can bring, so when anti-piracy groups moved against Legendas subbing group earlier this year, hackers were motivated enough to take their revenge.

While Legendas argued that fansubbers aren’t thieves but avid customers, anti-piracy outfits clearly don’t agree.

One such group is ALIS, Israel’s arm of the MPAA. In late 2007 it assisted in raids on the admins of three sites known as ‘xvoom’, ‘MYakuza’ and ‘Donkey‘ which carried Hebrew subtitles for US movies. In the end ALIS reached private compensation and closure agreements with the owners of two of the sites and took legal action against a third.

Now in 2009 ALIS is again active against creators of subtitles. Targeting Qsubs, one of Israel’s best translation groups, ALIS is threatening legal action against three of its members after sending them cease and desist letters last week.

ALIS is demanding that Qsubs, which has dozens of translators, stops their activities and is ordering the three translators to pay damages of around $264,000 each. They also want the individuals to issue a public apology for creating subtitles. ALIS believes that the three individuals it has identified are administrators of Qsubs.

In addition to copyright claims over subtitles, ALIS lawyer Eran Presenti says that there are further infringements on Qsubs such as movie and TV artwork along with various screenshots.

While the legal ramifications are digested by the Qsubs team, its subtitling activities have been suspended.

According to intellectual property lawyer Ran Camille, movie and TV show scripts are considered “dramatic creations” and therefore subject to copyright law. Article 16 of the Copyrights Act states that only the primary copyright holder has the right to distribute any part of a finished product, subtitles included. However, it is unclear how this legal position is affected by subtitles translated from another language.

“We have been doing this for years and never got a dime for our services, everything was done for free,” Qsubs spokesman Amit told TorrentFreak. “We have a lawyer already which is costing us a lot of money that comes out of our own accounts,” he added.

Although Qsubs can finance their lawyer right now, they need further funds in order to mount their defense or sadly they could be forced to close down and pay huge damages. Anyone wishing to contribute can do so by pressing the PayPal donation button on the Qsubs site.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

ALIS reached private agreements with the admins of ‘xvoom’ and ‘MYakuza’, under which the sites would be closed and compensation paid.

“The feeling is very difficult. A website that I have put 2.5 years of work into was closed”, said the owner of ‘mYakuza’, who didn’t hire a legal team. “Links to illegal films were never available on the website but I preferred not to destroy my life and decided to shut it down completely. They have more lawyers and money. We came out lucky.”

Effi Teva, the admin of ‘Donkey’ wasn’t included in the settlement and legal procedures against him have begun.

Last Wednesday, the district court in Haifa, Israel, ordered the permanent closure of the movie and TV subtitling sites donkey.co.il and sratim.co.il.

The court decided that the sites infringed copyrights by offering links to unauthorized subtitles and Judge Gideon Ginat ruled that the defendant, Effi Teva, should pay compensation of 160,000 shekels to ALIS and various filmmakers, which includes the lawyers’ fee of 60,000 shekels.

Effi Teva didn’t give any testimony. The previous hearing in the case took place in 2007, but Teva didn’t show up then either, instead asking the plaintiff’s lawyer to request an extension.

Judge Ginat says that Teva requested postponements numerous times. “I want to make it clear”, said the judge, “that I said in the last meeting to those present that I won’t be able to keep postponing the dates of the hearing.”

Judge Ginat criticized the behavior of the defendant and his lawyer and said, “It goes without saying that the defendant and his proxy cannot dictate the hearing date in a last minute phone call.”

Lawyer Sarah Prazanti, who represents movie anti-piracy outfit ALIS said that the judge refused to accept the request to postponed the hearing, and gave the verdict. Effi Teva did not comment on the matter.

In France this week, Warner has been taking action of its own against subtitling sites. It says that such sites “make intellectual property available to the public without authorization,” such as foreign translations of Warner productions. “This,” says Warner in threats to various subtitling sites, “will affect your liability and exposes you to possible civil lawsuits.”

One site under threat is ‘Frigorifix’, which appears to be taking the threat seriously. “Never, until now have we had threats from rights holders that are as real and immediate as the ones we received yesterday.”

“Our names and addresses are listed with our registrar and web host,” said a representative of the site, “and we can not afford to undergo a judicial process.”

It is believed that members of the site will continue to translate, but no subtitles will be available from the site itself.

Earlier this month we reported on the problems faced by Brazilian sub-site Legendas.tv after anti-piracy action, but it quickly bounced back.

Thanks go to Q-subs translator ‘Godfather’

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

On Tuesday, virtually every site offering user-generated Greek subtitles (fansubs) for English language movies and TV shows received legal threats from EPOE. Within a very short time, all sites including greektvsubs.gr, subtitles.gr, greeksubs, subs4u.gr and apsubs.com had either closed down or removed all subtitles. A sample of the translated complaint issued to greektvsubs is shown below:

According to our information and evidence, in your capacity as owner and manager of the website under the name www.greektvsubs.gr, without right and in violation of the provisions of Law 2121/93, without the required prior written permission of the legitimate beneficiaries of copyright and related rights of our member-companies, are engaged in a totally illegal activity, which consists of right without translation in the English language texts / dialogues and subtitles creation of films or television series, the royalties of which belong to our member companies, which you have then illegally and without right, distributed via the Internet.

So why are the Greeks file-sharers so upset? Yiannis, a user close to the subtitling sites explained to TorrentFreak: “Greek TV networks are most of the times very slow in airing the popular shows (one or two years is common), not showing them at all or the worst, or show a season or two and then forget about them, leaving the fans looking desperately for solutions. DVD distribution companies are no better. Some popular shows do not even exist in a translated form.”

“A couple of years ago dedicated fans started working to translate and create subtitles of their favorite shows and they teamed up to create a few web sites to share them with the rest of the fans,” Yiannis said “One of the biggest was greektvsubs.gr. These people managed to do with hard work, love and dedication what the TV industry failed: translate TV show episodes hours after they were aired and offer the subtitles for Greek speaking people to be able to watch their favorite show.”

There is currently a fierce debate surrounding the legality of such fan-subtitling sites. The Greek subtitles (in common with user-generated subtitles in other locales) are the result of hours of really hard work, listening to the TV show or movie in its native English and then translating by hand into Greek. The ‘subbers’ don’t have access to the original scripts, everything is created from scratch since the movie or TV show isn’t even available in Greek, so on this basis some believe the sites operate legally. However, some are suggesting that under Greek copyright law, a translation could be considered as a ‘derivative work’ and as such requires permission from the original copyright holder.

Whatever the truth – and this is echoed in the emails we’ve received here at TorrentFreak from the fans – there is obviously a really healthy demand for these products in Greek language (not to mention from deaf people who absolutely rely on subtitles), yet the media companies spend their money on litigation, instead of addressing the core issue of giving the fans what they want.

In the meantime, while EPOE throws its considerable weight around, the show goes on for Greek subtitling fans as they head to their new home at gr.tvsubtitles.net.

Thanks to Yiannis and fakeb0us

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“Today I received a beautiful copy and paste notification from the Anti-Piracy Federation (FAP), which warns me that if we do not close the site, they will take legal action against me. I will engage a lawyer to advise me, but we may close Wikisubtitles temporarily as we clarify the matter. I hope from my heart that this is not the end of Wikisubtitles.”

Initially it appeared that the site’s host, BlueHost closed the site after the complaint, but that closure seems to have been lifted after some legal issues were addressed. However, the site is now voluntarily closed pending a proper legal evaluation by WikiSubtitles’ lawyer.

Although there are many cases of subtitle files that are ripped from DVD, the communities at sites like WikiSubtitles have their own translators who create custom subtitles for tv programming and movies. The subtitles are created by enthusiasts from scratch using tools provided by the site, for the benefit of those who don’t understand the original language and for the deaf. A user at WikiSubtitles hopes that no data has been lost as a result of the shutdown as along with friends, they were right in the middle of manually subtitling some Dr Who episodes.

WikiSubtitles is not on its own in receiving such threats. Alexe1, the admin of SoloSubtitulos has also been on the end of similar treatment, and he advises Smalley to “simply ignore these emails.” Alexe1 maintains his site is entirely non-commercial, doesn’t distribute copyrighted works, and falls short every month when it comes to raising enough cash to pay the hosting bills.

Like many, Alexe1′s motivation for creating his own subtitles was so that a disabled family member could enjoy what he was enjoying: “I personally write subtitles because my grandmother was born deaf and with those subtitles she is now able to enjoy current TV series and movies.”

“How do you think this fact would look in a trial?”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.