It’s a lot easier to look the other way when it’s free.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/fan-made-subtitl... (2017)
IANAL but I'd say the main argument for it being free use is that subtitles don't take away from movie/TV sales. There's no harm. To the contrary -- fan-made subtitles in languages the studio didn't produce might generate purchases where there were none before.
While the main argument against it is that it's part of and enables broader piracy -- if you can show that people are overwhelmingly using subtitles with content they downloaded illegally, then it is part of harming the studios.
(Also, subtitles are not scripts. They usually don't even indicate who's speaking, much less include all of the scene descriptions and instructions. Probably ~half the words in a script are not dialog.)
do you think that people who want subtitles would pay for content if there were no subtitles available for it?
subtitles either increase sales, or they do nothing. they may increase illegitimate sharing, but they won't do it at the expense of sales.
Pretty much. If you're Japanese and don't speak English, and a show you really want to watch is only available to pirate in English (no subtitles available) which means you can't understand it, but if you subscribe to Netflix you can watch it with Japanese subtitles that Netflix provides... I mean yeah?
I'm presenting both sides of the argument. The question is really, which side will a court find to be stronger? And there may very well be a distinction here between fan-made subtitle translations, versus official subtitles.
Like all things in life, YMMV. ;)
The bottom line is that most of these points haven't been challenged outside of that BREIN case, nor do they cover some of the more valuable uses of authored or revised subtitles, such as subtitling and captioning works that never had them, or in languages that weren't translated, or to correct significant translation errors.
The legal cases of subtitling are especially pertinent now that we have relatively accurate, low-cost, easy to implement realtime speech-to-text. If many devices that play video can now add subtitles, or even captions, locally in real time, how much value is there in paying lawyers to pursue cases to protect the copyright of _just_ the subtitles? Is editing a subtitle script generated by a speech-to-text engine also a copyright violation, and if so, who all is violating the copyright? The person who feeds the video to the engine? The editor, who could be a different person? The distributor of the resulting subtitle file?
Oh boy. I mean, I frequently rewind turn on subtitles for 10 seconds because a bit of dialog is totally unintelligible. (Or it turns out to be perfectly intelligible but it's something with a proper noun like "Kantauganwe it is.")
For people without accessibility needs, speech-to-text is the least help when they most need it...
The subs wouldn’t exist without the original work.
Edit: Yes, it’s a subset of the script and not thee script itself, and being a pedant about that isn’t a useful point. It’s just pedantic.
Imagining I were to hand you a book. It's Harry Potter but missing every third sentence. You tell me "It's Harry Potter" and I'm like "nuh uh", I'd be just being a pedantic ass and not making a good point.
Similarly, I might pay for a subscription to a website which has a detailed review of that episode along with screenshots. Neither replace watching it, not even close.
I do think that subs are a little bit more legally ambiguous than a review but I think you could make a reasonable argument that they're a fair use under US copyright law.
Movie scripts contain much more than the dialogues. There's enough of an argument to be made that transcription is covered by fair use rights.
source: I worked in the music biz
Calling the subtitles "basically a script" is like saying JavaScript is basically Java.
Things like [ominous music plays] are not part of the script at all, but featured in subtitles