Swedish Police Shut Down Fan-Made Subtitle Site

On July 9, 2013, the Swedish police force’s intellectual crime division seized the servers of the website Undertexter.se, which collects and distributes fan-made English and Swedish subtitles for television shows and films. Undertexter.se and other websites like it allow users to download text files that can be played and synchronized with video files to provide subtitles that translate what is being said in a video. These subtitle files are rarely based on official screenplays from rights-holders, and are usually personal transcriptions of the dialogue by fans. The website’s owners continue to assert that they do not believe that the services they were providing are illegal, especially considering that they did not charge users for the services. However, the Rights Alliance, the organization that prompted the police to act, states that its members were concerned about Undertexter.se’s activities because the website appeared to contain a significant amount of advertising, which suggests the owners were profiting from the services. Another concern related to the fact that the subtitles being provided were for movies that had not yet been released in Sweden, and the subtitles had not been approved by rights-holders, indicating that they may have been designed for pirated works. If found to be infringing the rights of right-holders, Undertexter.se’s owners could face either fines or up to two years in prison. Last year, in a similar case in Norway, a judge fined the owner of the subtitle website, Norsub, 15,000 kroner ($2,450) after finding that the owner had not profited from the website and shut the site down following a warning that the website’s activity was illegal. For more commentary see: http://tinyurl.com/nc9lmyo; and http://tinyurl.com/oupqc2p Summary by: Thomas Wong