March 2, 2009
Anti-Piracy Action Closes Yet More Subfan Sites
Once thought to be operating well under the radar, recent months have seen fresh efforts to silence sites that provide fan-created translations of movies and TV shows for their home countries. The latest targets for shutdown - Israel and France. TorrentFreak reports.
With the assistance of ALIS (Israel’s answer to the MPAA), in late 2007 raids were conducted on the homes of the admins of three sites known as ‘xvoom’, ‘MYakuza’ and ‘Donkey‘ which carried Hebrew subtitles for US movies.
Last Wednesday, the district court in Haifa, Israel, ordered the permanent closure of the movie and TV subtitling sites donkey.co.il and sratim.co.il.
The court decided that the sites infringed copyrights by offering links to unauthorized subtitles and Judge Gideon Ginat ruled that the defendant, Effi Teva, should pay compensation of 160,000 shekels ($38,000) to ALIS and various filmmakers, which includes the lawyers’ fee of 60,000 shekels ($14,000).
In France this week, Warner has been taking action of its own against subtitling sites.
One site under threat is ‘Frigorifix’, which appears to be taking the threat seriously. “Never, until now have we had threats from rights holders that are as real and immediate as the ones we received yesterday.
Related:
-- Subfans - Who are these people, who spend hours translating entire episodes for the benefit of others?
-- Keskidi. A subtitling tool for video sharing platforms - A new tool for subfans - non US TV fans who translate entire episodes for the benefit of others - as well as anyone else who want their videos to reach an international audience.
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