Poland: Nine people held by police for translating movies
[ Thursday, 17 May 2007, michuk ]
Nine people involved in a community portal Napisy.org have been held for questioning by Polish police forces. The possible accusation is publishing illegal translations of foreign movies.
Napisy.org was the most popular Polish portal where users (and there are over 600 thousands active users) were free to submit translated subtitles for popular movies (mostly from English to Polish, but not only). Popular video players could be then used to display the subtitles when playing a movie (usually a DVD-rip).
The website (already shut down) was located on German servers. Zbigniew Urbański from the Polish National Police informed that the police action was supported by German colleagues and the Polish Foundation for protecting Audio-Video content (connected with The Polish Society of the Phonographic Industry, a Polish RIAA/MPAA-like organization):
The people held for questioning are mostly the people who were involved in translating the movies. They were stopped in different places all over the country: in Śląsk (Silesia), Podlasie (Podlachia), Kraków (Cracow) and Szczecin (Stettin). Among the arrested was the service administrator from Zabrze. The case is evolving. Further actions are coming.
During the proceedings, 10 PCs and 7 laptops have been secured by the Police, together with about 2000 CDs containing (probably) illegally copied movies and PC software.
According to Polish copyright law any “processing” of others’ content including translating is prohibited without permission. The people held (aged 20 - 30) were questioned on Wednesday and Thursday and then allowed to leave. In case of being accused of illegal publishing of copyrighted material, they can spend in jail up to 2 years (in the worst case).
Sources: Gazeta.pl, idg.pl, Police [in Polish]
Comments from napisy.org administrator
Dziennik Internautów has just published some comments sent to them by Krzysztof ‘rotorek’ Czerepak, the administrator of napisy.org. Here is a translation:
I confirm that yesterday a few our collegues were held by the police. I personally know of 6 persons (not 9 as the police claims): 2 admins, 3 moderators and one translator (a woman). I can’t tell if there were more holdings.
All the people were taken by the police exactly at 6 in the morning. We don’t know where the police got the information about their home addresses since the personal data of none of them was publicly available.
Pan Urbański (the police chairman) gave the media some false information and some deliberate lies, probably intending to present the police proceedings as a brave and successful action.
(…)
As of the future of the service, it’s hard to tell anything right now, since I could not contact the other admin since the police took his phone ( probably hoping to find some information there
)
Personally I would like to hear some lawyer’s opinion about the whole situation. I would also like to point that most of the amateurish translations appear long before a “professional” translation is prepared. It is also an often omitted fact that a lot of “professionals” use (or steal, naming the things) our translations to do their job. Nobody calls this a violation of law…
Moreover — the idea of the service is non-commercial. The translators do not make money for their work.
In the next e-mail mr Krzysztof added:
Also, I don’t know anything about those 2000 CDs. I assume that this is another poilce lie.
The two admins had laptops with fully legal software, while the woman-translator had a company-owned laptop.
About napisy.org
Napisy.org was the most popular community subtitle exchange portal in Poland. The service has thousands of translated subtitle files in the database. Its existence was first threatened in December 2005 when a representative of a major Polish film corporation Gutek Film, Jakub Duszyński, demanded that all the subtitles violating the law were removed from napisy.org. The service was even shut down by its administrators for a short while but the administrators eventually decided to continue running it, since the law related to the “fair/personal use” is pretty unclear and the feasibility of real threat seemed to be low.
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18 Comments
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Under Polish copyright law making a translation is not prohibited unless it’s not disseminated without permission of the copyright holder.
Well, it ISN’T illegal to translate only text in Poland.
@yetihehe: You are probably talking about this statement (in Polish, sorry).
The situation you refer to concerned a case where one person allowed another to translate some commercial (2-3 lines of text) from French to Polish and then use it in TV. The businessmen later had an argument and one accused another of theft of material goods (pencils to be exact) and copyright violation of the commercial text.
This is true that in this case the act of translating was not considered a crime and even publishing it in TV was not considered a violation of copyright. Still, it is uncertain whether publishing the much longer subtitle text without any agreement between the author and the translator on the Internet is a crime or not. It is however certain that the police thinks it is since they held the Napisy.org website admins and translators for that.
I’m not accusing anybody. I believe this situation is really sick and it shows the complete mess in priorities of the police actions (there are hundreds of Nazi websites in Poland for example and nobody does anything about it!), I just want to say that according to law, the case is not obvious.
I do not know the “ins and outs” of Polish law, but here we have an example of a very useful service that has been provided by an online community.
It demonstrates very clearly that there is a market for this kind of service.
If the film distribution companies got their act together and provided this kind of service at a reasonable cost and reasonably quickly after a film was released there would be no reason for a community to do this.
Here again we see an example of a business model in the film industry that has failed miserably to adapt to the realities of the online world…and uses the repressive aparatus of the state to enforce an obsolete business model.
Post Nazi propaganda and there is no problem. Translate the latest Hollywood movie into the local language and you end up in jail. There is something seriously wrong with this system of values.
Polish people are weird.
Although what these people did seems innocent enough, it was still piracy. They should have foreseen what was coming to them. Instead of breaking the law, they could have been making their own movies or teaching their compatriots English, both of which are not illegal. I sympathize with them but that doesn’t mean they did nothing wrong.
Jim, who is paying you? The record companies or the film companies…or are you just slavering over the Mickey Mouse fiasco copyright rules for free.
These people will be released with police apology. Poland is an independent and sovereign state. If people want to translate movie subtitles for free - they will do it. It will be interesting to see who is behind this persecution of Poles.
@Johh Williams: Polish poeple are ok but polish government is weird!!! No!!! Wait! Government is not even wierd IT’s ******!!!!
BTW I didn’t vote for them.
I think there is pretty good chance courts will disagree with police…
this is the 2nd time recently poland has been in the news for crazy filesharing stuff. The other time was about the uni LAN dc++ hub where they actually arrested the users for sharing stuff. I thought it was bad here in the US but damn…
Seriously though. “OMG subs!!!!” you gotta be fucking kidding me!
DVD movie “The Last Dragon” and many others to, has no polish subtitles(voiceover mono only audio).The only way to watch movie with original soud is ripping dvd to hdd,then add subtitle.Its …..?
That sucks ass. what a lame law.
Looks like the polish film corp can’t come out with good films so they need to keep people from seeing other foreign films. what other reason could there be?
How do I get in contact with the team of Napisy.org? I would like to help them out by offer them free hosting in Sweden. As far as I know we have no laws that would forbid them to translate subtitles. Btw. I can’t speak polish.
I’m not sure how can you get in touch with admin of napisy.org but for sure you can easily contact with http://www.napisy24.pl/kontakt.php another polish subtitle group or kinomania.org - you will find email address on that page.
Regards
I hope the situation will change. Organizations like ZAIKS or FOTA do everything to make us “pirates”.
I can say for now that napisy.org will probably not return, although there is still a slight chance… but we HATAK (a group translating mainly TV series) and our friends KINOMANIA (mainly movies) will sure be interested in moving their services abroad. If anyone wants to help, napisy@hatak.pl
I’ve just discovered that another subtitles web site …
http://www.subtitles.images.o2.cz/
… has disappeared without a trace. It seems that Napisy is the victim of a far larger, probably Europe-wide operation. And this makes perfect sense when you think about it. Translating film subtitles and making them freely available undermines the con-business of film licensing and film distribution which aims to segregate national markets for the sole purpose of maximizing profits.
Oops, I made a mistake. The Czech subtitles web site that I thought had disappeared is still alive …
http://subtitles.images.o2.cz/
… I just got the url wrong. But of course I stand by everything I said about the rotten business of film licensing and film distribution. They are gangsters.