legal to share movie vocab or subtitles?

[markpete]

Hi, all.  I just found this website for learning Chinese from movies: https://learn-chinese-from-movies.com  

 

A little disappointing, though, with the vocab lists-- they just parsed the subtitles and grabbed definitions from CC-CEDICT or something similar, instead of tailoring the definitions to the context in the movie.  It feels like they did 90% of the work and then stopped just short of having a really useful product.  Also not entirely sure it's legal, so there's that, too ? They suggest that you need to find some other place to download the actual movies, but that they will provide subtitle files.

 

So that got me thinking about trying to improve on this.  But again, not sure how legitimate it would be.  Does anyone here know about how legal it is to

• Share vocabulary lists from movies?
• Share subtitles / dialog from movies?
• Point people to other websites where they can get subtitle files?
• Point people to other websites where they can download the movies?

 

I suspect the first one is okay but none of the rest, but maybe I’m wrong on that.

 

Cheers,

   Mark

[DavyJonesLocker]

1 hour ago, markpete said:

• Share vocabulary lists from movies?
• Share subtitles / dialog from movies?
• Point people to other websites where they can get subtitle files?
• Point people to other websites where they can download the movies?

 

 

Well I am not a lawyer but I can't see how you can copyright a vocab list.

As for srt files there are a heap of websites that have this. 

 

Nothing wrong with pointing to a website that you can download movies legally like net flick, YouTube, IQIYI. It's the illegal ones that cause issues and would potentially cause trouble for website owners like ChineseForums so it would be against forum rules 

 

Remember that you can't actually (legally) download the movie, only stream it or play from a encrypted TV hard drive , app etc (as far as Im aware)

 

I think apart from the last one it wouldnt bother me in the slightest sharing subtitle files. A distributor, producer would want to be pretty petty to get upset about starting srt files. It's not like sharing a ebook for free. People pay to see the movie not read the srt/ass file. In any case all your doing is free marketing of the movie for the distributor as who's going to read the dialog and not watch the movie

 

 

Edit: @imron has a fancy pants program CTA that analyses Chinese text including srt files and breaks it down by word frequency etc. 

 

Edit 2:  good idea actually . Parsing a movie srt file would be great especially if you can get rid of names, places , link it to pleco, or a definition specific to that movie  etc however the manual work required would be pretty long. Each movie would take a day I'd imagine. 

 

 

[roddy]

4 hours ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

I can't see how you can copyright a vocab list.

It's work. If you go through the dictionary and make up lists for workplace vocab, leisure vocab, healthcare vocab, you may have copyright. Not in the individual words, but in the organisation of them. A book, now I think of it, is just a long list of words in a particular order...

 

Similarly subtitles.

 

The observation that it happens a lot doesn't change anything. And obviously, national laws vary.

 

As far as this site is concerned, infringement of mass-market copyright isn't a concern. We prefer not to actually host anything, but you're welcome to link away. We are much less keen on piracy of Chinese-learning material, as in that case we're a bigger fish in a smaller pond. 

[DavyJonesLocker]

6 hours ago, markpete said:

Hi, all.  I just found this website for learning Chinese from movies: https://learn-chinese-from-movies.com  

 

 

 

I see these guys are also doing the whole "Over 2000 Characters PER Movie – Enough to Read a Chinese Newspaper" marketing speil

 

10 a day for 200 days and you can read a chinese newspaper, what can possibly go wrong ?