Petteri Pyyny
4 Feb 2003 13:28
The biggest site that has distributed Finnish language subtitles for movies, FinSubs, has been shut down. The Finnish copyright organization, Kopiosto, contacted the site's owners and asked them to shut down the site, because it violates its members' copyrights.
Site has been extremely popular in Finland, where dubbing is something that's never heard of (except in kids' cartoon movies). Most interesting part of the whole story is the fact that very big portion of the subtitles found from the site were actually made by the site members -- i.e. the subtitles weren't ripped from the DVD-Video discs, but actually translated from the movie itself. But apparently even activity this violates copyrights -- the movie studios own the rights to the script and don't allow unauthorized translations at all.
More information: FinSubs