3 Count: Subtitle Subtext

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1: Swedish Fan-Made Subtitle Site Is Shut Down By Copyright Police

First off today, John Biggs at TechCrunch reports that a Swedish copyright agency and authorities in the country have raided and seized the site Undertexter.se, which was a site dedicated to hosting Swedish and English subtitles for movies.

The site did not distribute the actual movies but, instead, distributed an encoded text file that users would sync up with the movie to get subtitles while watching it. Such subtitles are popular with illegal downloaders but are also used by legitimate viewers as well.

A similar site in Poland was shut down in 2007 but, historically, movie studios have not bothered with “fansub” sites as they’re called, making this action relatively unusual.

2: Aereo Sued by Hearst TV Station in Boston Over Copyright

Next up today, Don Jeffrey at Bloomberg reports that Boston TV station WCVB, which is owned by Hearst Stations Inc., has filed a lawsuit against TV streaming service Aereo over its expansion to the city.

Aereo is a TV streaming service that allows users to rent a tiny antenna so they can stream and record over-the-air television on a variety of devices. Aereo already faces a lawsuit from the major broadcast networks, that case playing out in Manhattan, but this represents the first time an individual station has filed suit.

WCVB makes many of the same arguments the networks did in the earlier case but those arguments failed to convince a judge to grant an injunction. According to the station, if Aereo is allowed to retransmit their signal, they will suffer loss of revenue from advertising and authorized retransmissions of their content.

3: Apple Loses Government’s Antitrust Lawsuit Over E-Books

Finally today, Eriq Gardner at The Hollywood Reporter Esquire reports that Apple has been found to have colluded with book publishers to artificially raise the prices of Ebooks.

The lawsuit was filed in April of 2012 by the US Justice Department and alleged that Apple worked with publishers to change the way Ebooks were sold, moving away from a wholesale system, which was favored by Amazon, to a commission one where retailers took a percentage of each sale.

According to the government, Apple used its position to pressure publishers into forcing Amazon to raise its prices by hiking price caps and pushing other retailers to adopt the same model. The judge will now have to determine what penalties Apple should face for its participation in the conspiracy. The publishers settled their suits before the trial.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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