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Polish Fans Held By Police For Movie Translations
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri May 18, 2007 09:56 AM
from the harsh-critics dept.
from the harsh-critics dept.
michuk writes "Nine people involved in a community portal Napisy.org were held for questioning by the Polish police forces this Wednesday. They will be probably be accused of publishing illegal translations of foreign movies (which is forbidden by Polish copyright law). Napisy.org website was shut down immediately afterwards by the German forces (since the servers were located in Germany). The service was the most popular Polish on-line portal where users were free to submit translated subtitles for popular movies. 'According to Polish copyright law any "processing" of others' content including translating is prohibited without permission. The people held (aged 20 - 30) were questioned on Wednesday and Thursday and then allowed to leave. In case of being accused of illegal publishing of copyrighted material, they can spend in jail up to 2 years (in the worst case).'"
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Illegal thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than blaming them, the law needs to be changed.
Re:Illegal thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
to a certain degree, this makes sense. witness the 2003 illegal translation of harry potter and the order of the phoenix. it was so bad that the quality of the content was dramatically reduced... at one point the translator even wrote "Here comes something that I'm unable to translate, sorry."
so, the idea of having 'approved' translators can be necessary to preserve the integrity of the content.
my source for this is here [bbc.co.uk]
Parent
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Re:Illegal thing... (Score:5, Informative)
Did you even the article or this thread? Those translating need approval from the HOLDER of the copyright -- not the state. If it's "horrible", then I doubt the copyright holder will see much of a profit...
Parent
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Same as with music and movies - we can download them, we can't publish (upload) them.
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Here's my question: In American and European countries, would it be illegal to publish a transcript of an entire movie without permission? How about if the transcript were in a different language from the original movie? It may not be just Polish law in question.
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Next you need to think about what would happen if a derivative work in form of translation wouldn't need permission from the copyright holder: I could translated Harry Potter into swed
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As for the entire screenplay being written "clean house." That's still a violation. It'd be like cam cording the movie.
Tom
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The RIAA goes after those who infringe on the copyright of the recording. The Harry Fox A
Re:Illegal thing... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Are you kidding? (Score:4, Funny)
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My question is (Score:3, Interesting)
Same type of laws in the US (and most countries)? (Score:4, Informative)
The following part of USC 17 Chapter 1 seems pretty clear to me (my emphasis): USC 17 Chapter 1:http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17
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On a more positive note, there are other silent-era films available to watch. I suggest "I Was Born But..." by Yasujiro Ozu.
Compare US:Polish film subtitle ratio (Score:2)
The difference is, most films are made in the USA, and few USA filmmakers provide translations into Polish.
Whereas most Polish films are already available with English subtitles (admittedly- or rather, thankfully- usually EN:GB).
This sounds like something the EU normally fixes. I'm surprised the EU haven't created a legal exemption in these kinds of cases. Translating into minority languages is normally heavily supported by the EU. I wouldn't bat an eyelid if the guys take it to the European Court or somesu
Wiki.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Encounter (Score:4, Funny)
Fan: Geck, wo ist mein Auto?
Officer: Suspect appears to be armed with translated movie quotes, shoot on site!
Anime fansub (Score:3, Interesting)
Poland has nothign on the USA (Score:4, Insightful)
In the USA you get less jail time for phyiscally beating someone and taking their copyrighted material than publishing copyrighted material.
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punishments fitting the crimes (Score:3, Insightful)
2 years? For the equivalent of making closed caption files?
I am always reminded of the rules applicable to Commonwealth of Virginia employees when I was one.
An employee could be fired for one instance of a level 3 offense immediately. It took more than one level 2 offense to be fired.
Punching one's boss was a level 2. Sleeping on the job was a level 3.
Sleeping while driving a bus might be worse than punching a boss, but most of the time this seemed upside-down and backwards to me.
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What would you have to do to get it down to a level 1? Burn the building down?
Software that helps to create subtitles on Linux? (Score:2)
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Re:Software that helps to create subtitles on Linu (Score:2)
Question: (Score:2, Insightful)
Understandable sort of... (Score:5, Funny)
I can see why this would be a threat to Hollywood.
After all, who will want to see the bulk of these films when it becomes common knowledge that behind the beautiful people and gorgeous back drops are atrocious dialogue and paint-by-numbers plots.
UPDATE ON THE STORY! (Score:3, Funny)
nugget of the larger story playing out (Score:4, Insightful)
well the internet frees people from being tied to distribution channels. and as with the printing press, there is an entrenched power that is losing because of this. of course movies, music, etc. is not going away because of the internet. but how movies and music are made and distribtued and how they make money is very definitely going to change, and there are real losers because of this. big (currently rich powerful, not for long) losers
but the internet was originally designed to route around damage in the event of nuclear war. compared to that, the "damage" that entrenched media interests will exert on the net is paltry, and easily routed around
there's no putting this genie back in the bottle
Things Haven't Changed (Score:3, Interesting)
polish movie translation situation (Score:2, Informative)
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What you should understand about Poland (Score:5, Insightful)
Every good thing that happens in this country gets shut down. It's completely hypocritical and they are targeting the wrong people. I live in a city of around 700 000 inhabitants and there are eight copy shops within 500 metres in any direction of my flat (I don't even live in the centre). I can go out to any of these copy shops and have a copyrighted textbook photocopied for about 3 cents (US) a page. Some copy shops even keep a library of texts that one can look through and order. Anything you want you can get, whatever subjects you're studying. One guy even has a website where you can order copied books beforehand, pay by credit card, and pick them up at your leisure! Most of the students here in Poland have never owned a real textbook, everyone buys photocopies. While it's true that many Polish students live off of less than 100$US a month (the average salary here is about 300$US a month or 5zl an hour so their parents don't have much to give them), the copy shops are making their living off of copyright infringement. Any day of the week, one can also go down to a special market and purchase bootlegged DVDs, CDs, software, and games. The police don't do much about these people, either.
In order to combat book photocopying, the government started a tax on all photocopies of 3gr a page (about 1 cent US). Now all photocopies are about 4 cents a page, and the tax goes not to the publishers or companies being infringed upon, but to the government. I think it's something like the tax the Canadian government puts on blank computer media. I think it's ridiculous. In typical Polish style, rather than identify the problem and deal with it, they do something completely stupid. For two years after I moved here, there was dog shit all over the pavement/sidewalks wherever people walked. You had to really look where you were going, because you would step in it. Rather than teach people to curb their dogs, or give fines for not picking up after animals, they hired people to go around every morning and clean the sidewalks of dog shit! They need to think about their labour laws and how much people are being paid (in an EU country, no less!), but instead they worry about some young people doing the people of Poland a service by writing subtitles for those who don't know English (or Turkish, or Greek, or Hindi).
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Unless... you know... THEY CAN READ. The fact that one guy does voice overs (not dubbing - that's a whole other industry, limited mainly to children's movies.) doesn't mean 95% of movies in the theaters are subtitled and you can buy thousands of movies that are, again, subtitled with neither a voice over or dubbe
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The translated subtitles were published online. You realize that the "Your" in "Your rights online" doesn't just refer to you, specifically, right?
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So you think he meant that "Your rights online" only refers to the rights that one has, not the rights one doesn't have, or wish one had? I can see how you could read it that way, but that would make for a rather dull discussion, chatting about all the things one could do online if one wished to .
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They were releasing translated subtitle files to be used with videos. Presumably, since they needed translating, these were foreign discs. Possibly imported, sure, but the implication is likely that people need these subs to enjoy material not released by the media cartels for that region, and therefore instigates piracy: the favorite bogeyman.
Of course, since the big companies couldn't be bothered to translate it and release it in that
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And now you know (Score:2, Insightful)
The ideas of copyright and patents have grown into this thing we call IP. I've mentioned this dozens of times now, but it is the simple truth.
IP laws have been about control of information and not profit for at least 25 years. Simple profit motives tell you that region encoding is not a bright idea. If someone wants to pay to import a disk, have it translated, etc. they will still be in the market for a nicely done local language version. You could potentially make two sales, or one sale if you never
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You know that Slashdot is viewed worldwide, not just in the US. (And, yes, I'm an American).
Re:Polish and Germans co-operating for law enforc. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent