Tag Archives: copyright

Fansubs: The New Wave

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Scene from BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad, episode 1

TED.com officially announced today a project that will crowdsource translations of every TED video in more than forty of the world’s most-vocalized languages. The splash page is viewable here.

The video above is a Japanese translation of Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ demo of Photosynth, one of the more interesting yet much shorter videos available at the TED website. As you can see, the subtitles work pretty well and the timing is for the most part up to par. The only petulant remarks I can make about meticulous details would be: 1) there’s no furigana… but that only applies to Japanese anyway, and 2) the subtitles cover up the images when the projector is shown… but that’s unavoidable, and it’s not that important a matter.

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Girugamesh, Sakura-Con, & Copywhat?

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Since Sakura-con‘s release of their promotional commercial to YouTube, a lot of buzz, both positive and negative, has swept across the Internet.

On top of the initial reactions in pure text (such as the video’s 2000+ comments as of the publication of this article), even Anime News Network’s Chicks on Anime picked up on the fandom’s backlash.

As much as anyone would like it, I’m not here to discuss the fandom or whatnot. Instead, my interest lies in a connection to a project that I’m helping out on and blogged about before: YouTomb, a project through the Students for Free Culture group at MIT where we look at the takedowns on YouTube.

The tale I will relate has already been told numerous times across the blogosphere. Little Kuriboh, a video producer on Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series. He, as well as many other creators on YouTube, made spin-off productions of the Sakura-con commercial. The commercial seems to have caused quite a ruckus over at 4chan and even made it into the Encyclopedia Dramatica, which catalogues most of the memes and miscellaneous “creativity” that occurs on the 4chan boards. On top of the multiple mashups available on YouTube, LK decided to post his own version of the commercial, entitled GUHROOGAMESH!!!1, onto the video site, which parodied the commercial’s audio using clips from the Yu-Gi-Oh animated series. Eventually, the video was removed by YouTube.

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YouTube, Fansubs, and a Conflict of Copyright

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[This article has been cross-posted to YouTomb.]

Fansubs: fan-produced subtitles added to original footage of foreign television programs or films.

Most commonly a practice by fans of Japanese animation, fansubs have, since the 1980s in America, allowed fans of anime to view the Japanese-language media and share it amongst friends. While technically illegal [1] in terms of copyright law, fansubbing in the Internet age has proliferated to a point that 1) fans rely on fansubbing groups to keep up with the latest series, and 2) the animation industry has felt the need to form a conversation around protecting their intellectual property [2]. By the end of 2008, the demand for English-language fansubs reached such a critical point that major Japanese animation companies teamed up with the (previously illegal) Crunchyroll.com to distribute fansubs streaming online in a timely manner (read: one hour after television broadcast in Japan) for a fee or after a longer period (one week) for free [3].

In the summer of 2008, I traveled down to Baltimore, MD for Otakon, the largest East-coast anime convention, and attended the Fansubber & Industry Discussion panel (viewable online [4]). After the panel ended, I snagged Interactii, one of the members of the popular fansubbing group Dattebayo Fansubs, LLC [5], for a quarter-hour to ask a few questions, reprinted below:

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