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Comment by pietjepuk88 | Hacker News Reader

But they always seem to offer English CC though, just not the regular ones (for many movies). And the regular ones should just be a simple transformation of the CC ones (strip all "\[.*?\]" stuff). That said, the other day I watched the movie "Easy A" which did happen to have both English CC and normal English subtitles. Still the only one I've found so far though.

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English CC is offered in English speaking countries probably for legal reasons. They are not available elsewhere in the world. In Germany you get only German subtitles.

For whatever reason this is not the case for series in Netflix, which most of the time contain also in English subtitles. Wouldn't have helped the original commenter's case of course.

English CC for English speaking countries is actually for deaf people. There's some new rule/law that is actually making websites include English CC's in order to be compliant, though I'm not sure what the penalty is for ignoring that (probably fines).

That’s not correct. All recent shows I watched on Netflix in Germany (on a German account) had English CC subtitles in addition to typically a range of others. This includes Originals and external content such as Star Trek TNG

Yes as I mentioned most series have English subtitles, while movies do not. I don't have a clue what's behind this difference.

Technically it is easy to create the subtitles, but legally that would be a derivative work of the CC subtitles, so again, it comes down to copyright law. :(

Wouldn't it be a derivative work of the original movie instead? (Assuming that the person creating them didn't use the CC subtitles as a reference point)

Just curious about the technicalities of copyright law.

Well I only phrased it that way because OP suggested running a regular expression on the English CC subtitles. :)

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