

Universal Subtitles: Making online video accessible to all - aeurielesn
http://www.drumbeat.org/universal-subtitles/

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kleiba
The people behind this service should beware of copyright violations - just
because a video has been made accessible to the general public by their
authors does not necessarily mean that others have the right to translate the
contents of that video.

I remember that a co-worker of mine started translating his favorite math book
into his native language, at first just for his private use. But then he
thought that others might benefit from his effort, too, so he contacted the
publisher of the original book. He was only half-way through with the
translations and had kept everything to himself, but the publisher was not
amused at all and fired back at him in classic cease-and-desist manner. He
stopped translating right away.

Such an attitude sucks, but from a business perspective I can sort of
understand that the copyright holders want to keep the option to offer a
translated version themselves. And in that case, it's certainly their right to
pick the (certified) translator of their choice.

I don't know if the above scenario translates (no pun intended) very well to
web videos, especially those that are made available without commercial
interest by their authors. But the question of copyrights is ever so present
these days.

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beoba
Your co-worker was creating a direct translated copy of the original material,
whereas in this case it's a caption which is only really usable in conjunction
with the original. I think the problem would be if you were actually
distributing the original video along with the caption, but in this case only
the user-created caption is changing hands.

See eg Rifftrax

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w1ntermute
An interesting related effort is collaborative subtitling, as done by ViKi:
<http://www.viki.com/>

They've got a web interface through which hundreds of people can
simultaneously work on the subtitles for one video. They were on TechCrunch a
few weeks ago, I think.

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pat2man
Its funny that they are targeting end users vs content creators. As a content
creator I assume you would enjoy having subtitles for your content.

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beoba
There are about/faq links, but they're all dead. Maybe wait until the site has
been finished before posting it.

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aeurielesn
They don't seem to be dead for me.

~~~
beoba
Looks like they hadn't finished posting the new layout at the time, it's all
different now.

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johndbritton
Try the main site: <http://universalsubtitles.org/>

