It’s been a while since I threw crap on the “evil corporation” trying to stop piracy on the internet. A few weeks ago it looked like we had made a bit of a breakthrough because one studio exec actually said that they should look at the piracy seen to learn what the consumers want and adapt.
And today? Well today we know that was just talk and a smokescreen. Because yesterday the Swedish anti piracy organization fixed a raid against a Swedish site. Not a torrent site. Not an FTP site or anything like that that supplies people with movies. No, this site was a source of subtitles!! Seriously – subtitles !! Apparently Henrik Ponten missed being in the spotlight so he went for a site serving up subtitles! And I’d get it if the charge was “aiding copyright violations” like they used to get the Piratebay guys, because they kinda are (although not more so than Winrar!). No, they played the “dialogue is copyrighted too”-card. Which is really great because this isn’t a gray area at all!!
I get how dialogue is copyrighted, but if a person sits down, takes his time to go through a movie and translates it to his tongue, makes his own interpretation of the dialogue and the gives it away for free, is that really copyright violation? If you just write the dialogue in the same language as the movie, word for word, than yea, I can get how that’d be problematic. But I know just how much interpretation goes into translating movies. When I was last tasked with translating a movie we actually had to read the notes that came with the preview to know exactly what they meant in some specific cases. So does a interpretation & translation fall under copyright of the movie? If so .. then I’d say they owe me some money, because that’s exactly what I did for them for free not too long ago and noone told me what we did there was going under any copyright protection?
This’ll be fun to see how it goes. If they end up with the same judges as the piratebay guys they don’t stand a chance if there’s a gray area. I just hope some defense lawyer makes it black and white.