Kinema Club Subtitling Consortium

[Lang Thompson]

Though the requirement of producing a subtitled tape is reasonable and fair
it unfortunately will limit the tapes to the circle of people who are in
the least need of them.  People who are interested in the films but don't
know Japanese will be excluded.  I can't think of a good solution to this
right off hand since the work of producing a translation is enormous and
probably outweights whatever contributions non-Japanese speakers might be
able to make.


Also, the copyright issues may be a bit less clear.  (Though I'm not a
practicing lawyer, I spent a year in law school studying Intellectual
Property.)  Though how these matters might play out in a real world
situation could be different (after all, how many producers or sellers of
fansubbed anime have been sued?), it's worthing keeping in mind that:

1.  Though films may become public domain in Japan after 50 years, they
could still be protected in the US by US copyright for at least another 25.
 This issue doesn't really seem to be settled, particularly since most of
the questions have revolved around works that are still protected in their
country of origin but are public domain in other countries.

2.  Whether the subtitled tapes are in fact hurting sales or whether
they're being sold doesn't affect any possible status of copyright
violation, only the potential amount of damages.

3.  If you've produced subtitles for a film that's still in copyright and
you don't have the explicit permission of the holder then you won't own the
copyright to your own translation (since it's an unauthorized derivative
work). 

LT
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Lang Thompson
http://www.tcf.ua.edu/wlt4

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