That Which Copyright Destroys, ‘Pirates’ Can Save
from the piracy-provides-what-copyright-destroys dept
There’s an interesting post on TorrentFreak that concerns so-called “pirate” subtitles for films. It’s absurd that anyone could consider subtitles to be piracy in any way. They are a good example of how ordinary people can add value by generously helping others enjoy films and TV programs in languages they don’t understand. In no sense do “pirate” subtitles “steal” from those films and programs, they manifestly enhance them. And yet the ownership-obsessed copyright world actively pursues people who dare to spread joy in this way. In discussing these subtitles, TorrentFreak mentions a site that I’ve not heard of before, Karagarga:
an illustrious BitTorrent tracker that’s been around for more than 18 years. Becoming a member of the private community isn’t easy but those inside gain access to a wealth of film obscurities.
The site focuses on archiving rare classic and cult movies, as well as other film-related content. Blockbusters and other popular Hollywood releases can’t be found on the site as uploading them is strictly forbidden.
TorrentFreak links to an article about Karagarga published some years ago by the Canadian newspaper National Post. Here’s a key point it makes:
It’s difficult to overstate the significance of such a resource. Movies of unflagging historical merit are otherwise lost to changes in technology and time every year: film prints are damaged or lost, musty VHS tapes aren’t upgraded, DVDs fall out of print without reissue, back catalogues never make the transition to digital. But should even a single copy of the film exist, however tenuously, it can survive on Karagarga: one person uploads a rarity and dozens more continue to share.
Although that mentions things like film prints being lost, or back catalogues that aren’t converted to digital formats, the underlying cause of films being lost is copyright. It is copyright that prevents people from making backups of films, whether analogue or digital. Even though people are painfully aware of the vulnerability of films that exist in a few copies or even just one copy, it is generally illegal for them to do anything about it, because of copyright. Instead, they must often sit by as cinematic masterpieces are lost forever.
Unless, of course, sites like Karagarga make unauthorized digital copies. It’s a great demonstration of the fact that copyright, far from preserving culture, often leads to its permanent loss. And that supposedly “evil” sites like Karagarga are the ones that save it for posterity.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally posted to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: copyright, karagarga, piracy, preservation, subtitles
Comments on “That Which Copyright Destroys, ‘Pirates’ Can Save”
See also video games, where the overwhelming majority of games made before the Internet basically became a household utility would likely be lost to the sands of time without piracy—especially arcade games.
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In other ways it’s getting even worse since then, as more and more games of the more modern era become a tangle of licensing and copyrights spread across a bunch of different companies which make games impossible to bring back in any official capacity once they go out of print and the deals expire, without gigantic mega-mergers of already monolithic publishers and media giants, so instead these titles end up in a copyright no man’s land where it’s impossible to make them legally available.
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Also many video games now are online only, especially those targeting the mobile device market. Once the publisher decides they don’t want to pay for the servers anymore, they are shutdown and the game goes poof.
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If Kragarga is saving obscure films for posterity, how can you argue that the existence of copyright is causing “cinematic masterpieces [to be lost] forever,”[lol] Glyn?
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Kragarga is saving obscure films for posterity in spite of copyright, not because of it. Or did you not actually read the whole article?
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This is precisely the kind of mindset that suggests that diseases don’t matter anymore because advanced medicine exists.
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The parent comment didn’t say it didn’t matter. It’s more like saying an easily-curable disease is killing people, when it’s in fact not (because people get the cure).
The existence of this site does not demonstrate that copyright is causing things to be lost. It merely hints at the possibility that they could. Maybe things are indeed being lost due to copyright. Certainly it could have been a factor in the missing Doctor Who episodes, which are now fewer in number after some heroic efforts to recover them. But we’re talking about “are”, not “were”, so are there significant numbers of TV shows and films, from the current millenium, for which no known copies exist?
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An illegal activity is not a sensible, or reliable means of preserving culture, especially as the archive has to be passed to a new archivist if the works are to make it into the public domain. Indeed unless and until such an archive can release works to the public domain, it cures nothing, and may only delay the loss of the works.
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Why does it have to be “significant numbers”? If just one or two movies or TV-shows goes missing because of copyright it proves the point.
Also, don’t make the mistake of just considering shows and movies made in the west.
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Purely to evaluate the statement as phrased. Glyn wrote “Instead, they must often sit by as cinematic masterpieces are lost forever.” If it’s a thing that’s happened once or twice, that’s bad and shouldn’t be tolerated (and I’ve long been in favor of abolishing copyright). It just doesn’t meet the criteria of “often”; it’s a thing that’s happened a few times, not something that “is” happening.
(Don’t overlook that “If”: I’m not saying it’s rare. I’m asking.)
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Can we use that argument on copyright? Copyright infringement doesn’t happen “often”. Studios and artists don’t lose their jobs “often”. Even pro-copyright interests can’t name these things happening “often”. Can we then tell them that their concerns don’t exist? After all, you expect us to play by the same rules.
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If the cure was made illegal, in the same way that piracy is treated as copyright infringement, you can expect fatalities from the disease to start spiking unless people take things into their own hands and actively commit illegal acts.
If you actively ignore the long list of movies, music and games that can no longer be played on newer devices and consoles while no repairs can be carried out on older machines, then yes, you can claim that “it merely hints at the possibility”.
Absolutely no known? Difficult to say. Even if a copy exists, you’d be hard pressed to know without additional, tedious investigation, to determine whether it’s the result of licensed archiving, pirates making a copy for BitTorrent, or someone backing up a DVD that they paid money for.
But if you’re as in favor of abolishing copyright as you claim to be, you really wouldn’t be sinking to the levels of copyright maximalists of constantly shifting the goalposts. The idea that we have to wait until a significant portion of culture is lost before we decide that archiving is necessary is pretty fucking dumb. It’s like the myth that claims someone needs to be missing for over 24 hours before a police report can be filed. Or the idea that most women aren’t raped, so rape protections aren’t necessary.
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My goal hasn’t changed: I seek the full and legal preservation of all published cultural works, and any unpublished artifacts (source code, raw video, etc.) underlying them. And the ability to legally access them, copy them, and build upon them. Within a short time of publication, if not instantly.
The statements that people make, though, still need to be evaluated on their own merits. Copyright makes my goal illegal, but I don’t see it causing many published works to be lost. That’s the “goalpost” established by Glyn, not by me.
I’m well aware of this. It’s a problem. But, again, it’s mostly not causing things to be lost. The software has been (illegally) saved, and emulators have been developed (illegally, if one believes Nintendo and Sony—which no reasonable person should). What music or film has been published in the last decade without near-instantly appearing on underground networks? With films, I can sometimes get them a week or two before their proper American release, if I’m willing to tolerate Korean subtitles or on-screen casino ads.
People are already dying due to medical care being unaffordable, a problem linked to drug patents among other things. This situation is unacceptable—and unlike copyright, we don’t have illegal workarounds at our fingertips.
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At what point would you be allowed to attribute the illegality of your backup or preservation of published works to copyright? When something gets pushed beyond the point of no return, like the global climate situation?
For the sake of argument, let’s say I punch you in the stomach every day, same time every day. It is intensely discomforting at best and absolutely debilitating at worst. You ask me to stop, pull out all the legal recourses you have on hand, but someone – me or a greater figure of authority, perhaps – tells you, “What’s the harm in getting punched in the stomach every day? What’s being permanently lost? You don’t have a good reason to say why this should be stopped. We’re going to prevent you from legally stopping this from happening.” Then what? What would be the point where it’s decided that it’s bad enough? When you’re hospitalized or put six feet under?
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No one can legally purchase No One Lives Forever because the legal issues surrounding its copyright have kept it from being reissued or remade. Were it not for piracy, that game would most likely be lost. Tell me when I’m tellin’ lies.
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That’s exactly the point: things could hypothetically become lost, but in reality, they’re mostly not. Because, as was pointed out, people are saving them despite the impediment of copyright.
I doubt you’re lying, but that statement is untrue because it fails to consider the secondary market. The game was issued on physical media (for 3 platforms), which in the USA means anyone who has the media can legally sell it to any willing buyer. Your statement also doesn’t consider orphan works laws, which in this case would appear to allow legal reproduction and sale in some countries.
The lack of legality (or commerce) doesn’t mean stuff is being lost. It just means we’re in a ridiculous situation that should be fixed. But here’s a less-than-fully-legal copy of the game you mentioned, for Windows—and with source code, even, which makes it a better situation than most games.
(I suspect much source code actually is being lost. Generally, such unpublished work is not considered “culture”; and even without copyright, it would probably be lost as a trade secret enforced via non-disclosure agreements.)
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The overwhelming majority of those “archival” copies are, regardless of morals or ethics, illegal copies. Take those out of the equation and you’re left with no legal way to purchase No One Lives Forever. And who knows if the source code and game assets are even still in the hands of anyone who claims to have the rights—never mind whether the code and assets are fully intact. But for the outright illegal actions of people who are “preserving” a game “despite the impediment of copyright”, No One Lives Forever would be nothing more than a playthrough video on YouTube.
And that is the point: Copyright is the sole impediment that keeps No One Lives Forever from being legally distributed. Without legal distribution, the game is only available through illegal channels. I hate copyright as much as the next disillusioned asshole, but even I recognize that illegal “preservation” sits in a precarious position that could eventually be shut down. We shouldn’t have to rely on pirates for the preservation of games—or anything else, for that matter.
No, it doesn’t. No One Lives Forever is more than 20 years old; assuming it went out of print, say, five years after its initial release, that would mean the most recently distributed intact copies of the physical release is at least 18 years old. I say “intact” because that’s the big thing you’re missing: No Disc Lives Forever.
Sure, you might be able to find a copy of the game on eBay or something. But as time goes on, those discs will eventually decay and become unusable. When that happens to a majority of the physical copies still floating around, the ones still intact will likely be sealed up for preservation, never to be on the market again. The game will then be legally unavailable through even the secondhand market.
Realistically, anyone who wants to play No One Lives Forever these days will do so by grabbing an illegal download instead of spending a higher-than-necessary amount of money for a secondhand physical copy. But for breaking the law, the game will never legally be available again to anyone but game collectors who can afford to pay higher-than-necessary prices for classic games. And we’re in that situation because of copyright.
Yeah, well, No One Lives Forever isn’t technically orphaned. It’s in legal limbo because of competing copyright claims. That none of the invested parties seem interested in resolving these claims is their problem. That this means illegal distribution is the only way we can play the game is copyright’s problem.
But that lack of legality does mean the chances of stuff being lost is much higher. Without copyright to stand in our way, people could independently—and legally—preserve the game and even update it for modern consoles/PCs and such without worrying about whether the publisher/developer(s) will release the source code and the assets. With copyright weighing us down, however, any independent preservation efforts will put people in the legal equivalent of a Sword of Damocles situation where the sword is a massive civil lawsuit and the string holding the sword would be the copyright limbo. Would you want to be the guy upon whose head that sword falls if and when the copyright limbo is ever resolved?
Which, again, is the point: When the only impediment to the legal preservation of source code is the law itself, and the only way around that impediment is an illegal act, copyright (and the enforcement thereof) is absolutely the biggest barrier to preservation. Ergo, copyright is—and will always be—the primary reason for losing a game to the sands of time.
Oh, and one more thing:
Anything “less than fully legal” is generally illegal. It’s an illegal copy. Just say “illegal copy” next time.
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I’m not missing it. I just don’t think we’re there yet. CD-ROMs have quite a bit more error correction than music CDs, which mostly work 40 years on (if stored indoors rather than in hot cars).
Also, it’s not illegal in most countries to make and use backup copies of commercial CDs, and I’ve had good luck reading 20-year-old low-quality CD-Rs. I’m not sure it’s even illegal to sell those, bundled with an unreadable original.
Something’s not truly “lost” till every copy—original or backup, legal or illegal—is gone.
No, it’s not illegal till a court has ruled that fair use doesn’t apply. And I’m certainly not going to accuse the Internet Archive of illegality; as a registered American library, it has a somewhat different legal status than the average “pirate”, which also weighs on fair-use arguments.
I pretty much entirely agree with the substance of what you and Glyn wrote, though. The whole situation sucks, and laws need to be changed to fix it. I just don’t want to promote such reform on the easily-falsified premise that old games, films, etc. are regularly being lost. (And I mean as originally experienced by the public. Source code’s separate. To the extent our laws allow copyright at all, they should require such things to be deposited with a national library before copyright is granted.)
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I’m a bit too busy/tired/mentally drained to handle the rest of your post, so I’mma just handle this one thing:
Distributing a whole-ass game to which you don’t own the rights isn’t “Fair Use”—it’s “copyright infringement”. That’s an illegal act no matter how much you want to argue otherwise, and any copy distributed that way is an illegal copy. The ZIP file on my hard drive that has a copy of every NES game ever dumped on the Internet is illegal as hell. Tell me when I’m tellin’ lies.
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You keep trying to give copyright interests every benefit of the doubt. I think you’ll find that they’re not going to reciprocate your noble graciousness.
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Many of the early movies and sound recording are no longer available in any form, and there is the day the music burned, which destroyed many master recording, some being the only copy available.
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Copyright threatens that archive with destruction should any copyright holder get the information to go after it. If that happens only private copies will be left, and like the site, liable to vanish if the owners cannot, or fail to keep the copies in a viable state and format. That is preservation by such means is a poor substitute for proper archiving, and given digital capacities, keeping the films available on a streaming service.
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This is designed feature of copyright laws. The old material need to disappear for there to be space for new entrants. The market dynamics/people buying movie tickets simply do not work if people spend their time watching star wars.
The popular works will survive longest amount of time, but everything will be gone after 200 years. New products will take their place.
Business of selling movie tickets is relying on old material to become unavailable when content companies upgrade their storage mechanisms from film to vhs tapes to cdroms to dvd disks to hard disks to web services etc. Each iteration will find that old material will be permanently lost when last film projector disappers to the dust of time.
The preservation activities should focus on less popular works. Noone cares if you preserve yet another star wars collection, but everyone will be angry if copy of mega motion disappears to the dust of time.
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lmao no it doesn’t
lmao fuck off you deluded genocidal incel
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what will you do when your dvd collection fills your bookshelf/space reserved for the movies?
you either throw part of the dvds to trashcan or you stop buying new ones.
When the world is full of movie copies, you need to throw some copies to transcan, or you’ll stop buying new ones…
the logic is perfectly valid.
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lmao fuck off
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Tell me about Shakespeare again …? If Bach, Telemann, and the like had been “protected” by draconian laws in the Holy Roman Empire the way their successors are “protected” in the United States of America, Bach would not have survived to be rediscovered by Mendelssohn and to inspire even later the Heavy Metal guitarists.
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Another Tero post, another hate-filled rant against the public domain.
Of course, the entire reason why the public domain even exists is because copyright law exists. Copyright law is your temporary protection against the public domain, not the other way around.
Unfortunately for you, it is still entirely legal to pay for a ticket to watch Titanic or Star Wars instead of Meshpage, and that is something that even your government won’t be able to help you with.
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We do know that hollywood studios are powerful. Their technology is result of 100 years of hard work, and anything built with computers cannot match the quality. Given that meshpage is made with computers, it struggles to beat hollywood studio’s technology.
But at least I don’t compete against them with their own tech. Many tech vendors in similar situation have decided to try sell video technology to the masses, even though customers already have access to such tech via hollywood’s technology license. Meshpage simply does not use video technology, and the competition against hollywood is significantly more healthy operation than what most of the tech vendors can invent.
Thus meshpage is in very good position in the marketplace. While popularity is still lacking, the technology has real innovations implemented and deployed to customers. And the innovations are not just copyright infringement of hollywood’s blockbuster movie magic, but instead we work with 3d models that are completely different basis for content display.
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Hollywood themselves haven’t done shit to contribute to that hard work beyond paying for it, in the same way you pay a plumber to fix your leaking pipe instead of doing it yourself.
And considering how much weight in Hollywood’s filmmaking is carried by special effects and CGI, this idea that anything made with computers is worse compared to what Hollywood makes is laughable.
Hollywood doesn’t license technology, you dithering moron. If Hollywood licensed the tech and other vendors were, as you claim, selling the same video technology, Hollywood would be suing over it. But they don’t, because your example flat out does not exist.
The claim you’re making here is not an admission of the strength of your tech. All you’re saying is that it relies on incompatible file formats that you’re desperately trying to market as a plus point. At this point, even a road-sweeping agency competes with Hollywood better than you because they provide a completely different product format. And they actually have customers, unlike you.
All you have is a 3D engine that most programming students in videogame college can create as a part of their compulsory curriculum. An engine that you have personally rendered incompatible with most other corporate production functions, and copied the user interface appearance from other similar applications which any competent lawyer team would have sued you for if not for the fact that you lack customers and money.
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These so called programming students are not in the market for selling gltf_to_zip converters. So if these students ever got their engines ready and shipped to customers, they’re doing something completely different operations than what meshpage is doing given that their output is not actually competing against meshpage in any meaningful way.
Yes, supporting standards like gltf is bound to make it incompatible. Embrace&extend is their story. Not mine.
This is strange claim after you’ve been complaining that the user interface is too difficult to use and incompatible with the standard right-mouse-button-select that competition like blender can offer.
If I just copied the user interface, then those same errors that make meshpage’s user interface impossible to use, would be present in the competition’s cloned solution too. And this is why you fail.
I didn’t clone other people’s user interface, since I know better. How builder’s user interface was designed was by rejecting the user interface components that symbian phones used, and implementing user interface on the remaining space of user interface components. Since I’ve implemented both symbian’s user interface and meshpage/gameapi builder’s user interface, I can claim to have knowledge of the full set of different user interface components. Just the same product doesnt have all of them.
This is why you fail. You cannot see that my phone development restricts heavily what kind of product is possible in meshpage and gameapi builder. Since the “innovative idea rejections” comes from phone side, you cannot claim that I have cloned other people’s user interface. The nearest clone to builder is from wordpress/woocommerce user interface, which has menu of operations in the left side of the window. And woocommerce is not doing any 3d stuff.
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Neither is Hollywood in the market for selling animation tech, but here you are claiming that European studios cannot compete with Hollywood in that field.
The only thing that claim of yours proves is that you made changes to make the experience slightly different. And I can tell you, according to your own standards for stricter copyright law, that doesn’t matter. All it takes is for a lawyer to claim that the visual node looks close enough to the Kismet portion of Unreal, and the monetary will to haul you to court over it.
So this is something you’ve never actually explained – at this point has anyone who used a Nokia phone reliant on the Symbian engine actually used Meshpage? Has any of the million users you claim to have existed actually modified any of its code to make something new? Is there any market for Symbian development?
You keep trying to sell Symbian as an underserved market that somehow also simultaneously exists, but the truth is that if there was any kind of potential for Symbian as a programming language, you wouldn’t be here insulting other people for not using it.
I don’t doubt nobody can see what fully goes on in that echo chamber of your head, seeing that you’ve also boasted about taking off all your code from Github and insisting that open source should be banned.
The truth is that in five years’ time – no, ten, twenty, thirty years’ time – you’ll still be angry and bitter why nobody in Finland recognizes your genius.
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I have explained already years ago why this idea of yours is broken. Basically the subway maps problem where the map creators are actually mappping the real world instead of copy-pasting other people’s software. What part of the real world both unreal engine and our meshpage/gameapi builder is mapping is the intel x86 cpu instruction maze. This mapping the real world is powerful defense against claims of copyright infringement.
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And it was a terrible explanation then as it is now.
The subway maps made by someone else were also made by pointing out that subway stations are arranged and connected in the exact way. You spent that thread years ago arguing that if a person asked someone else how to navigate the subways instead of buying a map, that person committed copyright infringement because money was not spent on a map. Nobody would accept this legal explanation, especially after you claimed that subway companies make their money from selling the maps instead of subway tickets.
And that will still need to be tested in a court of law, just like the way you claim “fair use” doesn’t count as a defense. Unless you’d like to admit that fair use is legitimate, but we all know how that would go. Suffice to say, nobody is going to believe the rantings of a washed-up Finn, who thinks that Russia declared war on Ukraine to defend his copyright.
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mapping the real world is a clear failure in substantial similarity copyright test that usa courts are using.
You can use it as a defense, but you just run out of money for lawyer fees before they evaluate your fair use defense. Google vs Oracle paid millions is lawyers fees before courts decided on the fair use. Also you first need to admit copyright infringement, which is kinda bad position to take. Its significantly better position, if you dont need to admit infringement.
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Because nobody sues mapmakers for copyright infringement. What you’re arguing is a claim that everyone needs to be sued for writing in a book “2 + 2 = 4”, because everyone comes to the same answer. That’s completely ludicrous.
Lawyers charge lots of money. That in itself is not a proof point for whether you have a case or not. Oracle paid their lawyers millions of dollars, yet you don’t call their case wrong.
Fair use means you don’t admit infringement. You keep wanting the whole infringement admission to be a thing just to paint people as guilty. That’s not how it works.
An invite only website is a really clever way to preserve anything.
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Until you realize it hosts content from directors whose home countries have arrest warrants out for them.
And that’s the best case scenario for some of these movies.
That in which the studios decided to release rental versions without closed captions or subtitles to protect themselves from losing an imagine future sale… because the disabled will TOTALLY want to purchase items from a company that has clearly shown they don’t give a single fsck about them.
That in which the popular image of VO artists at iirc Funimation using ‘pirate’ subtitles to record dialog because the pirate ones were way better than the offical ones.
That in which a popular image of a subtitle release group going past on the screen in a commercial setting.
Imagine if as part of getting a copyright issued required that an archival copy be made available to the copyright office so that when it enters into the public domain, in a couple thousand years, the public finally will have unrestricted access as the law requires after their “short period of time” of exclusive rights.
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I have very little faith in a government entity being responsible for successfully maintaining archives of all copyrighted content.
IMO, copyrighted content should be archived by the consumers of the content who still find value in it – so instead I imagine a world where consumers are granted an archival copy that they can keep and legally distribute to anyone after the works enter the public domain. I believe this is how it should work – it puts the burden of archival on the people who actually consider the works to have value lasting into the public domain (“the people”) and is a fair trade off for supporting the artist initially with their purchase of the content.
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Under current copyright terms, that requires that their children and grandchildren take on the task of preserving the works. Under current rules, would be possible for an account of the war by a young person to still be under copyright today, that is they could potentially have lived 90 to 100 years past the end of the war, which id they were 10 when the war ended would mean they died at 100 to 110 years old, and then the 75 year rule kicks in. From publication to the public domain could potentially take 150 years plus.
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Oh, I’m well aware… and ridiculous copyright term length is definitely part of the problem of archiving content.
However, assuming that something was afforded copyright protection but is still being distributed 50-70 years after it is first created, and people still have a desire to archive it, the option should still be available.
Just because copyright terms are ridiculously long, that doesn’t make my point invalid – in my view, legal consumers of copyrighted content should have the option to retain an archival copy of it indefinitely until it’s public domain.
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The US copyright archive didn’t burn to the ground taking untold numbers of masters with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire
Nor would they be able to get away with lying about the extent of the loss like UMG did.
The fact that it is accepted that the industries granted these extraordinary rights can’t be bothered to report who actually holds them until someone wants to build upon part of the culture, then they will bother to see if they own the rights so they can sue… this is not how the Public Domain or Copyright was intended to work and it would be nice if the public who are granting these ‘limited time’ rights be able to know within seconds who actually holds those rights if they aren’t in the public domain yet.
They cried because sending in a postcard was to much of a burden to keep their rights intact, so instead they were granted massive powers & control over the public and they never have to let us have anything or face penalties…
I wrap up with…
Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday you money grubbing assholes, your eternal copyright fell through.
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While major rightsholders like Disney and Warner remove legal options for watching their content, because they have perverse financial incentives to do so.
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Whoops, did I post that as a reply? It was meant to be a top-level comment.
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Uh, but they do, just like the non-disabled give lots of money to the film and music companies who antagonise them.
Copyright infringers, the modern day historical preservationists
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it, if culture is to grow and be preserved it will be in spite of copyright, not because of it.
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It’s not absurd. The original author of the material already handled subtitling the movie to the markets where they plan to distribute the material. Since subtitles already exist, any additional hobbyist subtitles are completely redundant.
If the hobbyist subtitle operation plans to widen the available area where movie could be available, i.e. original author didn’t handle subtitling to that market area, then the geographic area expansion is illegal under copyright laws. This is because copyright owners need to have control over which area of the world their material is available at, and unauthorised widening or expansion of the material availability is always illegal operation.
The other reasons for allowing hobbyist subtitling operations are not very convincing either. Supporting local languages from disappearing has been cited as a reason, but again the problem is that the original material is coming from piracy market and not from original authors of the movie.
Proper preservation activity will ask for permission from the authors. This is known good pattern, and has been working well in the past.
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hahaha lmao what?? hahahahaha
Just because a work has been translated/subtitled doesn’t mean it has been translated/subtitled well. The quality of translation makes a significant difference in people’s ability to enjoy and appreciate a show, book, etc.
“Official” translations are often not good quality because quality human translation is time-consuming and expensive, and most companies just want the job done fast and cheap. Or a proper translation might require knowledge of specific jargon that is mostly gained informally through participating in a subculture/fandom and can’t easily be looked up online, so even a professional translation will sound off.
In addition, the goals of the publisher are not always aligned with the goals of readers/viewers. I remember once I thought I would practice my Korean by comparing a popular English book with its Korean translation. I was dismayed to find that anything that made the writing at all interesting had been completely stripped out in the Korean version, leaving just a bare, simplistic narrative. This is not exactly rare either, publishers will remove or rearrange whole chapters from books and edit or delete scenes from movies and shows, leaving the audience with a completely different work. Some people wouldn’t mind that, some people would.
There’s a reason multiple alternate translations of classic works exist – some people want a simple paraphrase, others want it as literal as possible, different people enjoy translations that vary in tone or emphasize specific aspects of the work. Everyone should be able to freely produce translations of works that they care about.
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The amount of money reserved for translation depends on how much valid sales they expect to receive from that geographic area. If your area praises pirates and never buys the original, of course your area might have trouble getting investments for translation and marketing.
you can blame the lack of money for translation to your copyright minimisation patterns.
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For translations into English, I’ve actually never seen piracy brought up as a reason for why more translations aren’t published. In fact, I would say the opposite is true: if a foreign work is organically generating so much demand that people are already producing pirate translations, that’s an indicator of an opportunity to profit from marketing an official translation.
But in general, it’s simply inherently difficult for all but the most popular foreign works to generate enough profit to make paying an additional 2nd author (high-quality translator) more attractive than paying a single native author.
Plus there are languages where the population does not have much money, period. Even if every single speaker bought a legal copy it might not be profitable enough to satisfy corporate greed. Art and culture should not be gatekept by corporate profit projections.
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Re: Re: Re:2
Problem with these pirate translations is that they’re always coming late in the product lifecycle. This information that some product gathers enough popularity that it would be worthwhile to release additional releases of it would be very useful at the time when original market reach is being designed. But after that product was already available in the market for 4 years and noone in the company even remembers what features we included to that product, the information that its now popular among mississippi river boats isn’t really too useful. The info just comes too late in the process.
Re: Re: Re:3
If it’s too late in the process then what are you even complaining about? If you’re not going to provide translations on the basis that it’s too late in the process, you don’t have a right to complaint when someone else does that work for you, for free.
Re: Re: Re:4
Of course I have right to complain if some 3rd party tries to resurrect products that we decided to discard 2 years ago. Any open source or hobbyist “improvement” to proprietary products is bound to just cause damage to the people who actually do the hard work. See how sco unix failed because linux offered the clone of the features? It extended the product lifecycle, but failed to keep original sco unix developers in the loop.
Re: Re: Re:5
What products did you even discard two years ago? The only “product” you have is Meshpage, which nobody else works on, and nobody makes a game using Meshpage as an engine besides you, because you boast about not having any users.
So you won’t allow anyone else to work on your stuff, then. On the one hand I understand why, but then you keep turning around and getting angry at us for not working on your stuff as users. At that point, people realize that there is nothing they can do that will be ever good enough for you and your tyrannical impositions.
You realize that projects still get worked on even after the original developers leave, right? Not all of them succeed, not all of them continue, and yet not all of them stop. That is not the criticism against open source you want it to be.
Re: Re: Re:6
The 100 games project output?
Re: Re: Re:7
The Meshpage-generated stuff you don’t even sell or put behind a paywall? That you put up for free on itch.io? Guy, nobody’s resurrecting that. There’s apps that can be downloaded for free that do a hundred times the hundred games you put out.
Re: Re: Re:5
I wonder, how much of Meshpage’s code is built on the discontinued graphics engine code from your time in Nokia? How many similarities are we going to see? Hell, the fact that it’s something to be displayed on the screen of a machine could be in violation of stricter copyright law.
I’m sure Nokia will be very interested to know to that an ex-developer is trying to make money from pirating their old code. Have fun defending that in court.
Re:
So, no one should watch Kamen Rider until Toei decides that the outside market is deserving English subs then.
I’m not allowed to watch, or import, strange Finnish horror movies because by your “rules”, I don’t speak Finnish, and importing a single copy through a friend is considered “infringement” and I should expect the creator to send a kill squad after me and my friend then.
and by tacitly implying culture should be destroyed by placing it under copyright, well…
That’s a level of psychopathy even I don’t touch.
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Re: Re:
yes, this is designed feature of copyright laws. When original author decides that your market area is not worth supporting, for various reasons like distance to the company headquarters is too large, then users outside the supported area has no such content available. This can happen for example if usa has hollywood fiercely competing for movie dominance so that finnish publishers will decide that they cannot beat hollywood’s marketing muscle, and thus rejects entry to usa market. When that happens, users have no alternative other than not watching the material.
expanding the market reach of the material is illegal.
how it can also happen is that publisher insists on getting exclusive license from the author. Then author is legally forbidden to offer the same material to another publisher, even if the geographic areas are non-intersecting. Thus publishers can limit the scope of the material in the world and can easier handle the end user support requests coming from the product.
Re: Re: Re:
This thinking is so late-stage capitalism it legitimately hurts.
You’re no friend of even your own culture.
The ease at which you admit it terrifies even me and has made me convinced that you and your maximalist ilk should be removed from the planet, yesterday.
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Re: Re: Re:2
By having strong movie industry in usa is most of the time good thing for citizens of usa. There will be large local market that consumes the locally built products. But where strong market fails is that companies outside that area are unwilling to directly compete against the strong players.
Thus its clearly visible that people in usa has not seen movies built locally in europe, since none of the european companies alone can compete against the whole hollywood. Thus many european companies are not expanding their movies to america’s markets, and instead the marketing efforts are directed to other side of the globe.
Re: Re: Re:3
None of what you typed is a meaningful, or useful, defense of copyright law. If anything, it’s a pretty big indictment that despite the existence of copyright, European studios can’t leverage it to compete with mainstream Hollywood.
The claim that your marketing efforts are directed to the other side of the globe is likewise another huge laugh. Nobody on this side of the planet cares bollocks for your content.
Re: Re: Re:4
Yes, competition against hollywood is what meshpage is doing. You just can’t do that properly if you use video technology.
the grassroots phenomenon always starts hidden but then conquers the whole area.
Re: Re: Re:5
Hasn’t one of your main talking points been the claim that European studios and you can’t compete against Hollywood precisely because you’re too small and too new by comparison? Now you’re suddenly doing competition? I’d ask you to make up your damn mind, but at this point it’s obvious to anyone reading that your argument is entirely based on you kissing the ass of Hollywood.
Right, how’s that worked out for you so far? Let’s have a look at the sum of your accomplishments, quoted from your own posts.
You’ve contributed to some minor game development in the Atari era and got your name in a few credits pages. Subsequently you went to work for Nokia in a time when people actually gave a shit about their phones, at which point you realized that you really cannot fucking stand working with other people because they ended up not implementing certain features of your design and demand.
Nokia then proceeded to fade into irrelevance on the heels of Apple, Samsung, and other big players entering the smartphone market, and you’ve been tinkering away at the graphics engine from your Nokia heyday, trying to look for some purpose. Maybe if you had an actual team helping your efforts you might get further than a tech demo, but you staunchly refuse to do anything other than go it alone.
You spent the last decade playing with your project on life support, at one point putting out some videos and demos on Github, itch.io, even taught some paying customers how to code – an experience you absolutely hated, even referring to your students as “idiots”, only making $54 over seven to ten years, which you never shut up about. In that time you’ve claimed to have been in talks with a game publisher to release Meshpage-based games, for which you claim to have signed a non-disclosure agreement, and aside from that absolutely nothing of note has happened. You paid an ad agency in another to run one ad on one bus, then got angry at the world for not respecting your marketing genius. You insisted that Russia is fighting a war against Ukraine in the name of copyright, among other ridiculous bluffs to demand money from users on a site which you openly hate.
Guy, your grassroots phenomenon isn’t going anywhere. At the rate you’re going, you’ll be fitted for a coffin before anyone in the government of Finland even knows what Meshpage is.
Re: Re: Re:6
I never designed or demanded any features to the phones. A cog wheel must recognize its location in the system and not complain about rest of the engine relying on your services. It’s always good to remind that the whole engine wouldn’t exist without every part working perfectly.
It’s this “working perfectly” that you simply cannot understand. You never had the experience of things just working as designed and there would be no need to question the fine details embedded in the output of your work.
Re: Re: Re:7
If the systems worked as “perfectly” as you claimed they were, you would not be here being bitter and angry that your wisdom and expertise weren’t respected, or that your features you wanted included in the final product were overlooked.
The truth is that you hated working in a team because you feel your opinions and abilities weren’t recognized, and as you’ve mentioned before, you’d rather live 15 miles away from all the humans in Finland because you genuinely hate all of them that much.
Re: Re: Re:8
Perfection means that the targets of your brainwashing operation wouldn’t be able to notice the odd activity that controls their behaviour.
It’s as if you some day find out that newton’s laws didn’t really work the way you think and the forces involved are significantly stronger than you think, and when the friction is removed from the system, full power of newton is unleached and you’ll realize your mistake.
Perfection is the activity that gets every small detail exactly correctly implemented.
Re: Re: Re:9
Then that’s a pretty big indictment that none of your “brainwashing operation” has been successful, ain’t it?
Again, it bears repeating: you could be here twenty years later and no one in the government of Finland will use or recommend Meshpage. It’s that sad.
Re: Re: Re:10
Sadly brainwashing operation is management’s responsibility. I.e. I was never responsible of it. Guinea pig is better status for me.
Re: Re: Re:11
No management is going to do brainwashing, or openly credit you for it.
I will say though that you are a sad little guinea pig, at least you can admit that much.
Already discussed from various angles above, but
is a bit hyperbolic. I’ve made numerous backups of films, both ones I have the rights to, and ones I don’t. I’ve got them backed up to a media server, AND I’ve got them backed up to an off-site storage location. What I don’t do is share them with others. If someone (other than me) wants to watch one of them, they have one way to do it: stream the video inside my home network.
Copyright isn’t stopping this; while copyright law in some jurisdictions MAY call this illegal, since I’m not distributing or making available the movies to third parties, there’s no way for any of the rights holders to have enough information to make a claim against me — and in my location, it’s not illegal anyway.
Now the challenging bit is going to be to figure out how to ensure that this collection is safeguarded after I die, because a lot of this work doesn’t revert to the public domain until long after I’ll be gone. Piracy would be a much simpler and less expensive on society way to handle it.
Re:
This is not the protection you want to think it is. Or at the very least, not enough protection. It’s true that some countries do allow private downloads for personal use, but those places still have rightsholders. Rightsholders who, given enough money and motivation, will have no qualms in ruining your day with an expensive, lengthy lawsuit and war of attrition.
And let’s make it clear, it is absolutely the copyright system that provides the mechanisms for rightsholders to go after you if they so choose. The RIAA and other similar organizations have named copyright law as the basis of why they believe making copies, even for the purposes of backups, should be illegal. Had there not been significant public backlash they would likely have secured favorable laws to entrench their positions.
I mean… what you’re doing already constitutes piracy by RIAA standards. Just hand over the passwords and credentials to someone in a last will and testament or something. Or like you said – put it up online and order the public release when you’re six feet under.