<nettime> movie subtitle fansite raided

[nettime's avid reader <nettime@kein.org>]

http://falkvinge.net/2013/07/10/fan-subtitle-site-raided-by-copyright-industry-aided-by-police/


The movie subtitle fansite undertexter.se has been raided by the police 
and copyright industry. This marks an escalation of the war against 
sharing culture and knowledge, as the site contained nothing but 
user-submitted translations of movie dialog. We are quickly coming to a 
two-tier justice system, where the copyright industry is right against 
single parents by definition, and that’s not taken very well.

The move subtitle fansite undertexter.se, literally meaning 
subtitles.se, is a site where people contribute their own translations 
of movies. This lets people who aren’t good at the original language of 
a movie or cartoon put those fanmade subtitles – fansubs – on top of the 
movie or cartoon. Fansubbing is a thriving culture which usually 
provides better-than-professional subtitles for new episodes with less 
than 24 hours of turnaround (whereas the providers of the original 
cartoon or movie can easily take six months or more).

What’s remarkable about this raid is that the copyright industry has 
decided to do a full-out raid against something that is entirely 
fan-made. It underscores the general sentiment of the copyright monopoly 
not protecting the creator of artwork, but protecting the big 
distribution monopolies, no matter who actually created the art. The 
copyright industry in Sweden has previously asserted threateningly that 
the dialog of a movie would be covered by the copyright monopoly, and 
that any fan translation – even for free – would be a violation of that 
monopoly. Still, going all-out with a police raid backed by the 
copyright industry’s enforcement arm in Sweden is a clear escalation of 
violence.

(In Sweden, the copyright industry can legally order police raids. They 
are called intrångsundersökning and are technically executed by the 
Enforcement Authority who enlist Police in turn. Details on the exact 
chain of command in this specific raid remain unclear as of Wednesday 
morning.)

In short, this event shows that the copyright industry will stop at 
nothing to reverse time to where they and they alone decided what 
culture and knowledge was available, and to whom. This war will not end 
until 1) the copyright industry is dead, or 2) they have complete 
control over access to the planet’s culture and knowledge. Pick your 
sides and place your bets.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the police is acting to protect 
the copyright industry, and not to uphold the law. This is very, very 
serious. When Netflix copied fansubs for their Hollywood movies from the 
fansub site DivXFinland, everybody was amused – even though it was a 
textbook copyright monopoly violation of those fansubs. But Netflix is 
part of the copyright industry, and therefore, they are above the law.


When the Swedish video-on-demand service Voddler sat up on its pretend 
high-horse-in-shining-armor and proclaimed its love for the copyright 
monopoly and how important it was to all of civilization, while at the 
same time building its entire service on GPL code and thereby committing 
a huge copyright monopoly violation themselves, there’s a pattern here. 
The rights, monopolies, and privileges don’t matter in the slightest; 
what matters is who holds them.

This is the emergence of a two-tier justice system, where some rules 
apply to one set of people (“high justice”), and other rules apply to 
the rest of people (“low justice”). But a two-tier justice system is not 
a justice system at all; it is an oppression system.

This game is a dangerous one to play for the political elite. When 
ordinary people are told that there aren’t police resources to 
investigate who raped them, who stole their car, and who broke into 
their home, and get the investigations closed in 15 minutes (which was 
the case with a rape investigation recently) – but there are police 
resources to conduct raids against fan-made creations from the common 
folk, just because the wealthiest feel like it (there’s not even a 
credible threat to base the raid on) — that’s a recipe for more than 
growing discontent. That’s a recipe for an uprising, in one form or 
another. Which form such an uprising takes will depend entirely on how 
bad the corruption has fested.

The crew from undertexter.se has a statement out as of this morning:

    Undertexter.se has had a police raid this morning (July 9) and 
servers and computers have been seized, and therefore, the site is down. 
We who work on the site don’t consider a interpretation of dialog to be 
something illegal, especially not when sharing it for free. Henrik 
Pontén [the copyright industry's primary henchman in Sweden], who is 
behind the raid, disagrees. Sorry Hollywood, this was the totally wrong 
card to play. We will never surrender. [...] We must do everything in 
our power to stop these anti-pirates. [...]

The Swedish Pirate Party has published a press statement:

    “The copyright industry is resorting to increasingly desperate 
measures to defend an obsolete copyright monopoly”, says Anna Troberg, 
leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. “Today’s monopoly scuttles and 
inhibits creativity in a way that is completely unreasonable. The raid 
against undertexter.se is yet another piece of evidence that the time 
has come to reform the copyright monopoly from the ground up.”




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