
Dutch court rules fan subtitles on TV and movies are illegal - phr4ts
https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/04/21/court-rules-fan-subtitles-tv-movies-illegal/
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mjevans
This is one of those cases where I feel the results are technically correct,
but that they are likely not what the average person (if thinking of their
best interests) wants.

Instead of enriching culture and promoting understanding of foreign viewpoints
this oppresses what is, at least in the US, the theoretical reason that such
information monopolies are purportedly allowed to exist. I cannot see how
banning this academic and educational work promotes the progress of science or
"useful arts" (I recall this meaning roughly 'crafts-person skills').

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wccrawford
I don't see that this really changes anything. Most fansub groups that I knew
of were pretty clear that they would take down anything that they were asked
to because they knew they were on shaky ground to start with.

On the flip side, most content producers (anime) didn't ask them to take them
down until they had their own translations planned because it was helping
them, not harming them.

Clearly, this group was not taking their stuff down when asked and even went
so far as to sue the people who were asking. I'm just amazed by that move. I
don't know anything about Dutch law, but I'd have been amazed if it worked out
like they thought it would.

And despite what the article says, I doubt this will have any influence on
courts in other countries.

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riffraff
Many anime fansub groups I followed in the past just removed works once the
originals got licensed.

Their stated goal was to make good stuff available in a language where it
wasn't, not piracy.

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kazinator
Fan subs are an enabler for promoting culture and stimulating tourism. So it
goes without saying that the administration of Holland doesn't at all mind
that someone outside of Holland is making subtitles for a Dutch TV show or
movie in English, or Hungarian, or Spanish or what have you.

I suspect they are just caving in to pressure from outsiders. If I were to
guess, English-speaking outsiders from America.

Hey, look who is a member of this "Dutch" BREIN group: the MPAA.

If Holland weren't in the EU, they might have the guts to tell them to go
home. "We don't mind Dutch TV and movies being subbed in English by American
fans, so we expect the same in reverse; have a nice day".

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zokier
How many people do you really think are making and/or watching fansubbed Dutch
content?

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__jal
Why do you find the question relevant?

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anon263626
Exactly. Seems like a specious strawman when the attack on personal use and
viewing experience is much broader. Corporate control seeks to pervade every
aspect of life and shake down people at every opportunity.

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deftnerd
I worry what this means for the future of deep-learning based audio analysis
tools to automatically generate subtitles (for the hard of hearing).

Does this mean that YouTube's audio-recognition powered automatic subtitles
are illegal in some edge cases? The platform can always have a ToS/shrinkwrap
allowing for automated subtitling, but legacy videos created before the policy
or videos that aren't owned by the uploader could cause legal problems.

Also, is this possibly case law that can be used to outlaw other forms of
describing media, such as drawing representations of the scenes or writing
descriptions of what happens?

Yes, that's pulling the current situation to obserb conclusions but sometimes
that's what happens with copyright.... always trying to push the law in ways
it was not intended.

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y7
Ruling (Dutch):
[https://stichtingbrein.nl/public/20170420%20SLOV%20vonnis%20...](https://stichtingbrein.nl/public/20170420%20SLOV%20vonnis%20NN.pdf)

Short article on the ruling (also in Dutch):
[https://www.boek9.nl/items/iept20170419-rb-amsterdam-
stichti...](https://www.boek9.nl/items/iept20170419-rb-amsterdam-stichting-
laat-ondertitels-vrij-v-brein)

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hyperman1
Things might be more subtle than they seem: These subtitles are a big enabler
for piracy. If you are not as fluent in English, stuff like popcorn time isn't
very usefull.

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jacobush
Very true. A ... ahem, friend of mine, has bought DVDs just to get at decent
subtitles.

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estebank
Any multilingual person that consumes foreign media targeted at the local
market knows that official subtitles are hit-and-miss, sometimes writing down
something that _sounds_ the same, but it's not (where/were) and in some cases
even reversing the meaning of the sentence. Fansubs, on the other hand, if
they are for popular media they have outstanding work poured into them, and
when it is for niche media they might be slightly lower quality, but in those
cases official subtitles are not available at all in the first place.

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moomin
I remember watching Alien 3 at the cinema with French subtitles:

Audio: She's down in there with the beast!

Subtitles: She's down in there with the priest!

(Weirdly, beast and priest sound much the same in French, too.)

Or when watching Neverending Story the turtle says "one thousand miles". The
subtitles convert this to kilometres with 6 decimal places showing.

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kmm
> (Weirdly, beast and priest sound much the same in French, too.)

Not that weirdly :) "beast" and "priest" are loanwords from the Old French
"beste" and "prestre". They then both went through sound changes. English
changed the /ɛ/ in both words to a /i/, and in French, the /s/ disappeared.

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anon263626
Greedy corporations leaning on governments to drive people away from their
content, criminalizing remixing and making content unusable by the blind and
others speaking different languages not approved. Plus, they probably want to
charge a fee for alternate language or requiring purchasing the content again
in that language. F that!

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knolax
It's a Dutch court.

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sctb
Thanks, we've added that to the title.

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zkms
[https://stichtingbrein.nl/public/20170420%20SLOV%20vonnis%20...](https://stichtingbrein.nl/public/20170420%20SLOV%20vonnis%20NN.pdf)

Here is the original court ruling -- can someone translate (heh) this (I can't
read it in the original)?

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aaron695
Making fan subs 'underground' I kinda feel like will make them more popular to
create.

I'm not clear which way this was going language wise?

Like it or not English seems like it will become the world language so perhaps
it's not all bad to make people watch things in English.

