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: Israeli MPAA Goes After Premier Subtitling Site

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: Anti-Piracy Action Closes Yet More Fansub Sites

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: Anti-Pirates Wipe Out Movie and TV ‘Fansub’ Sites

“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: WikiSubtitles Taken Down By Spanish Anti-Piracy Outfit

TorrentFreak: Where are you from, and what do you do when you aren’t running Opensubtitles?

Brano: First of all, I’d like to say hello to your readers and all movie fans out there. OK, back to your question. I am from Slovakia, currently working in a company as a SAP (ABAP) programmer. If I am not coding something for a company, I work on the Opensubtitles website. Apart from this, I go out, drink some beer, sometimes I watch movies (with subtitles ofcourse:), and I go to music parties…

TorrentFreak: When, why and how did you came up with the idea to start OpenSubtitles.org?

Brano: OpenSubtitles.org was established last year, at the beginning of 2005. I sat in some pub with my friends, talking about how hard it is to get subtitles, how bad subtitle web sites are, and what the perfect subtitle website would look like. We philosophized a bit about downloading subtitles, searching systems, and how good it will be if there would be a program that exactly knows which subtitles belongs to „my” movie.

Then, after some beers, we came up with the first idea , I decided to do something about it, and design the perfect subtitle website. We’re not there yet, but the project has the potential to change the whole system of finding and downloading subtitles.

TorrentFreak: Why the name OpenSubtitles.org?

Brano: Well, the main reason is that the content is open. This means every page on the site is available in XML format, just by adding /xml extension into URL. XML is far better for data processing than HTML. The main reason to use XML is for the translation of the site to other languages. Opensubtitles is currently available in 21 foreign languages, but we would like to have even more translations. The translating would not have been possible without the great help of our community!

When I created OpenSubtitles.org my target was to create an easy and understandable website. I didn’t want any flashing ads and banners and I hate registering, so almost all functions work without registration. And although the site may look simple, we so have some great features under the hood. For example, RSS and email results based on search criteria. There was a period in my life, when I used to downloaded subtitles before the movies, so I wanted feature like: find all subtitles in these languages, for thriller movies not older than 2 years, which have IMDB rating higher than 7. This all is possible, just click on this link Another cool feature is multisearch, just try this: make directory listing with movies (dir /b > out.txt), copy and paste this listing into the multisearch, and our server will list all subtitles found sorted by IMDB rating. IMDB is the basis of the whole website, so it is not possible to have the same movie saved under two different titles.

TorrentFreak: Are you currently collaborating with torrent sites?

Brano: I collaborate with mybittorent.com. For now this is only one site, but in the future it is possible to partner with more BitTorrent sites. I think that BitTorrent sites are missing subtitles for their movies. So it should be better for the users, if they can find/download matching subtitles directly from that site. It is possible to make unique identifier (imdb number/filesize). If there are torrent sites out there who are interested in cooperating, just contact me.

TorrentFreak: You only started a few months ago. How many visitors do you have at this point?

Brano: Good question. Immediately after launching website I saw, that one dedicated server is simple not enough. Right now we have two dedicated servers. Back to daily statistics. 40.000 Visitors and around 300.000 pageviews. Is it too few? For me – yes. Servers are still having some spare power than handle more, load is still around 1, so I’d like to see 1.000 visitors online at the same time in the future.

TorrentFreak: You offer a free subtitle manager called “SubDownloader” at your site. What is SubDownloader and why it so special?

Brano: SubDownloader is opensource program coded in python. The basic idea is: the user selects movie and SubDownloader downloads the matching subtitles for this movie. So users don’t need go to website and find the subtitles, the program will do this all for them.

Users are able to download subtitles for a movie, or they can select a directory on their hard drive where movies are stored, and the program will find all subtitles for them. It is based on unique (CRC64 + filesize), which is the same as hash used in MPC; but I’d suggest stronger one , based at least on MD5 or SHA1. Of course downloading is not the only one feature it has. Another important feature is that you’re able to upload subtitles to our server, so other people are able to download them. This is all automated, the program will automatically scan for an NFO file, and will extract other useful information from the filename for example.

TorrentFreak: When and how did you get the idea to open source the content of your website?

Brano: I like the idea of opensource. OpenSubtitles.org is not really opensource, we should call it opencontent. A month after the website was launched, Ivan Garcia from Spain (currently in Vietnam) contacted me a he volunteered to code a plugin to VLC player. Of course, I accepted his offer, because I made this site exactly for this. We discussed some details and we agreed on developing an opensource program, which will run on every operating system with a python interpreter. I coded XMLRPC interface for the website, and described functions. He wrote some basic routines and SubDownloader was slowly turning into a real application. The current version is 1.2.2, but I think 1.2.3 will be released very soon , the feedback we get is amazing.

TorrentFreak: What’s your message for future users of OpenSubtitles.org?

Brano: It is like P2P, but I call this system U2U , Users 2 Users. The more people will upload subtitles with SubDownloader, the more subtitles will be found correctly. We have further plans, making a commandline script (you will write something like subdownloader-console ,auto *.*) to autodownload subtitles for example. I am in in touch with XBOX community (XBMC), so they could make such a plugin. My dream is that the DirectShow filter will use this website, which would have similar functions as SubDownloader has , this should be a big progress , just open the movie and automatically download subtitles and watch movie immediately with them. I am a big fan of movies and so on, but dedicated servers cost some money, and I pay that from my own cash, I want to minimize the ads on the site. People who donate do this for a good cause. I also plan to make some t-shirts, so we could recognize each other on street. We are also looking for skilled programmers who can help us.

TorrentFreak: Thanks for the interview, and good luck with the website

Brano: You’re welcome.

Links:

Source: Interview with the Founder of Opensubtitles