Men Arrested for Transcribing a Movie, Posting Details to a Website | Hacker News Reader

Men Arrested for Transcribing a Movie, Posting Details to a Website

torrentfreak.com

38 pointsisaacfrond39 comments

> The problem with sites that extract text from movies and other content is that they reduce people’s desire to pay a fair price for content, which can lead to people not seeing the official full-length movies, causing great damage to rights holders

The article doesn't use the word "subtitles" so its not clear what they provided. Did they create subtitles in another language like english or just a movie plot (elaborate) summary ?

Considering Japan has no fair use exception, doesn't movie reviews also reduce people's desire to pay fair price.

What they provide is a text transcription of every words spoken (文字起こし) accompanying by a screenshot of the relevant scenes (in its original language). It’s less like elaborated summaries and more among the line of "posting a closed caption along with a relevant screenshot"

So you can read the movie like a comic book?

That's actually... kinda cool.

I can totally see how that should be copyright infringement (as opposed to just subtitle files).

But at the same time, I'd really like to try "reading" a movie that way, just to see what it's like.

It was briefly a thing in the 1970s. They called it a "fotonovel", and similar names:

https://www.allaboutthewaltons.com/merchandising/fotonovel.p...

The Star Trek ones were particularly popular.

That's wild! Thanks so much for sharing.

> So you can read the movie like a comic book?

people also enjoy the opposite experience. when my kid was 4-5, we watched these youtube videos which were just books. the camera hovered over a page of nursery rhymes, and the narrator would read them out loud. its fairly popular among immigrant parents who don’t speak good English but whose kids go to school in the us/uk etc. I wouldn’t know the meaning or how to pronounce several phrases in say Little Jack Horner sat in a corner etc. - so better to watch the book than read it.

I also follow a journalist on twitter who makes these videos of the new york times. So instead of subscribing to the newspaper and reading it, I am watching the newspaper being read by this journalist, who then adds some color to the topic as well, so I know what to think about this topic.

Do you have a link or some searchable name for the journalist? I’ve been intrigued by this genre for a while now.

The hashtag is #NYTReadalong. https://x.com/hashtag/NYTReadalong?src=hashtag_click

Now that you mention it, I remember reading through the entire first script of of Alien from 1976[1], which was really cool. I now feel an urge to re-experience that.

[1] http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/alien_early.html

While there is no general doctrine of ‘fair use’ in Japan, there are some equivalent exemptions provided by the Copyright Act, such as:

• quoting from and exploiting a work already made public fairly

and to the extent justified by the purpose of the quotations;

• private use, to a limited extent;

• reproduction in libraries;

• reproduction in school textbooks,schools and other educational institutions;

• use for those with disabilities; and

• reproduction for judicial proceedings.

https://www.aplawjapan.com/archives/pdf/file/GettingtheDealT...

I'd say a use by any other name is just as fair.

> The problem with sites that extract text from movies and other content is that they reduce people’s desire to pay a fair price for content

A bit strange to use "fair", which (to me) seems to be quite on a subjective side. Do people still think that the price is fair and only don't want to pay it? Or maybe some of them don't consider the price to be fair anymore :-)

Their definition of fair, of course. Your definition of fair may be illegal or at the very least immoral. Won’t you please think of the movie execs?

It appears spoilers are actually illegal in Japan. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Ugh. I wanted to find this out for myself!

Well done!

Reminds me of NFL's copyrights claim: “Any other use of this telecast or any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited.”

Do you mean spoiler used as some sort of harassment?

Or can't you discuss movies?

> “The problem with sites that extract text from movies and other content is that they reduce people’s desire to pay a fair price for content, which can lead to people not seeing the official full-length movies, causing great damage to rights holders,” the anti-piracy group explains.

So a bad critique of the movie, might also reduce people's desire to pay to see the movie. So with this kind of reasoning any information you give others about a movie (or other copyrightable work) could be problematic. Pretty strange stuff...

Ye I read that. It is just that it is so absurd that I hardly believe it.

I did some searching and I got no result from news orgs I recognized. But like, it seemed correct.

Then again, if I remember correctly Nintendo tried to go after videos of people playing their games at some point. I guess it makes sense from that perspective.

Makes me wonder, is imdb.com legal in Japan?

No, but IMDb.jp would be.

What does .com do which .jp does not?

Quite the non sequitur here lol:

> The belief that somehow everything is free on the internet was widespread in the late 1990s. Sites were overwhelmingly free and if MP3 files were spotted by an alert surfer, it was almost considered rude not to download them, bandwidth permitting.

Nowadays it's sites collecting surfers' data.

Article removed the information that it's a spoiler website for some reason.

It is obvious that a new arms race was going to start after the introduction of "AI" content laundering machines. Be careful posting your "AI" generated summaries.

Aside from the fact this is japan, where there is no fair use, the men were "posting articles to a website as part of a conspiracy to unfairly generate advertising revenue."

Most countries don't have fair use. The US is very unique in that regard. And unfortunately, given how prelevant the US is on the Internet, a lot of people seem to be under the misconception that fair use is just some sort of a universal thing.

What makes it unfair?

The fact that Japan is not the US, so your question is moot

by profiting from another person's work.

Is that really unfair? Surely we can see that in capitalist societies, profiteering from other peoples work is one of the core tenants.

The core tenet is that you've paid them for their work in order to profit off of it, in an exchange both parties have entered into freely.

Not that you've used their work without paying.

So people transcribing audio/video content should be paying for the opportunity to do so? They are quite literally offering a service based on derivative work.

Surely this is already ironed out, no? What are laws regarding transcriptions?

No, they don't get to at all if they're creating something that takes away from sales of the original item.

Yes this is ironed out. It's completely illegal, as it should be. No question about it.

If you're translating subtitles (without accompanying images) for someone to use together with the original media, then there's a good argument that's legal (even though many courts disagree), since you're not taking away from sales -- you might even be helping with them.

But creating a comic-book version of a movie you can read instead of watch? That's just blatant copyright infringement, period.

That would still be unfair, just broadly accepted unfairness.

When it's unlawful, it's unfair — even when the law itself is unfair.

allegedly.

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