Every day millions of users enjoy fan-built subtitles. They help nonnatives know English-speaking movie and present the deaf with a way to contain audio.
Quite often these subtitles are used in mixture with pirated files. This is a point in the side to copyright holder groups, who see this as an intimidation to their business.
In Sweden, Undertexter was one of the head subtitle sources for roughly a decade. The site enabled users to submit their own interpreted subtitles for films and TV shows, which existed then made available to the public.
In the summer of 2013, this reign became to an end after the site was picked offline. Following demand from Hollywood-based movie businesses, police raided the site and saw its servers.
The raid and consequent criminal investigation came as a shock to the site’s founder, Eugen Archy, who didn’t believe he or the site’s users were striving an illegal service.
“The people who operate on the site don’t think their own version of dialog to be something illegal, particularly when we’re delivering out these interpretations for free,” he said at the time.
The suspension made it clear that the judges disagreed. The Undertexter originator was prosecuted for giving copyright-infringing subtitles, risking a potential prison sentence. While Archy was found guilty this week, fortunately for him he remains a free man.
The Attunda District Court convicted the now 32-year-old operator to probation. In extension, he has to pay 217,000 Swedish Kroner ($27,000), which will be used from the advertising and donation revenues he received through the site.
While there were millions of subtitles open on Undertexter, only 74 films were referenced by the lawyer. These were precisely selected to ensure a strong case it seems, as several of the titles weren’t commercially ready in Sweden at the time.
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