this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 171 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Finally: ClosedSubtitles

EDIT: Also, MAN, a lot of straight up bootlicking in this thread. What the fuck kind of pirates are you? lmao

[–] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

ClosedSubtitles, ClosedAI...

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[–] gregorum@lemm.ee 139 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] andrew@lemmy.stuart.fun 37 points 1 year ago

Hey now, I'm sure they'll still gladly accept free labor for subtitle submissions!

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 111 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Jesus, reading comprehension is hard to come by eh? How have so many people struggled to actually read this?

They aren't requiring payment, nor are they requiring you to sign in or create an account.

They are transitioning from an old API to a new one. The new API (and the site itself) is ad supported and rate limited; 5 downloads per day unauthenticated, double that for a free account, or 'VIP' accounts have higher limits and no ads.

It's not authenticated access only, nor is it paid access only.

[–] java 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

"It's not paid, you can pay by watching ads and get a laughable amount of downloads per day for free!"

Sometimes you have to cycle through many subtitles to find the right one. They don't even produce them.

In the era of VPN, many users share the same IP too. You can reach the limit before downloading anything.

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In the era of VPN, many users share the same IP too. You can reach the limit before downloading anything.

Then create a free account and it's no longer limited by ip and you get double the anonymous limit.

[–] java 6 points 1 year ago

There is no need to have an account for that. This is a purely artificial measure.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How many subs do you download at a time??
Juat spread it out or cough up some cash ... >_>

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[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 105 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That doesn’t sound very open to me

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Title is a bit misleading. Starting with 2024 the site will be moving to a new API. The payment is too be able to continue to use the old API a while longer (for software that can't be changed yet).

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago
[–] Metal_Zealot@lemmy.ml 71 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (17 children)

How... how could you possibly start trying to profit off of a major resource for accessibility to movies. That's scummier than scummy. Fuck you OpenSubtitles, you're the fucking Elon Musk and Steve Huffman of deaf people everywhere. Get absolutely fucked.

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[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 66 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ha, i love how their reasoning tried to not point out the obvious: money

upgrade to vip for a better user experience! (cuz we made the other one shitty on purpose cuz money)

im not faulting them for charging a price for a service, just dont blow smoke up my ass for why youre doin it.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 162 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm actually faulting them for trying to make money off a crowdsourced service. They didn't write the damn subtitles.

[–] Kerrigor@kbin.social 95 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Also, wrong fucking audience. The people using this are pirating.... what do they think is going to happen when they put a paywall in front 😂

[–] Metal_Zealot@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Textbook shooting yourself in the foot, I really don't know what they were hoping to gain. You already had a long-lasting reputation in the online community, now you're a fucking scab

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i didnt know that! fuuuuuck those peoples

[–] Norgur@kbin.social 53 points 1 year ago

See, I get when YouTube or some such are asking for some kind of payment, since transcoding and delivering all those large video files is expensive as fuck. Yet, Open subtitles delivers text. Fucking. Text. The rest is done for them for free by the users. No, folks. You ain't getting any money.

[–] Metal_Zealot@lemmy.ml 47 points 1 year ago (3 children)

My wife is deaf, and I take this VERY fucking personally. This is predatory to an already (unfortunately) overlooked demographic of movie lovers, I will absolutely rally against this bullshit.

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My wife is deaf. So subtitles are a deal breaker for any media implementation I implement.

That is why I pay for open subtitles. I get no ads, continued access after this change and I'm helping maintain a service we use daily.

[–] lemann@lemmy.one 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That is why I pay for open subtitles

Lost me right here. Personally I'm not ever going to pay for a service where the work done by volunteer users, for free, is filling some random person's pockets. An argument can't even be made a la RedHat here - there's literally no value being added to the volunteers' work by OpenSubtitles...

OpenSubtitles literally has pulled a shXtter here IMO

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What about infrastructure costs? Are you comfortable making someone else pay for your access? What about the design and implementation of the API? Should all software be free?

Please note that I’m not trying to support this decision at all. I personally feel like API access is similar to SSO for enterprise stuff (check out sso.tax). I also feel like there should be some level of compensation and even profit so people can focus on building stuff like this. It’s really hard to define what that is, especially without transparent costs, which I don’t believe OpenSubtitles shares? Also they use super predatory ads so I don’t think they have any high ground to even suggest what I’m talking about.

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They host incredibly tiny text files. We are talking in the single KB range. Even serving millions of these a day is minor load to current hosting environments.

Most modern webpages load the equivalent of 1000s of subtitles to every user on every page load, including small sites like personal blogs.

I would be surprised if their hosting costs were even in the $1000s/month instead of $100s.

Thats the likely reason they don't share the costs. It's that cheap to run. Even asking for donations might be pushing it. Demanding payment? Bullshit.

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[–] Metal_Zealot@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

you know.... most companies include subs in the DVD or file.
For free.
You're paying for a service that should be the universal standard.

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[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 11 points 1 year ago

I'm not deaf but I fucking love subtitles.

There's a lot of mumbly actors out there.

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[–] veniasilente@lemm.ee 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Finally, even OpenSubtitles gets enshittified.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Making a burner account isnt that hard and hardly a shittification in my books.
Just a measure to ensure the free api access is correctly monetized which is a valid reason for a service to me.

Would you work for free for your workplace without a compensation beyond a $5 bill and a pat on the back at times because your boss felt generous?

[–] LoafyLemon@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Opensubtitles does not create the subtitles, that's done by the community, which is being monetised and sub authors get nothing out of it.

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[–] veniasilente@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would you work for free for your workplace without a compensation beyond a $5 bill and a pat on the back at times because your boss felt generous?

Misleading question. These kinds of communities are volunteer-fed, so you are basically asking me if I would work for free for a charity, which is the point. Things change notoriously when the boss then decides to monetize the entire thing for themself and not for you.

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[–] shiveyarbles 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Excellent so now they'll be paying volunteers for their work!

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[–] amaki@jlai.lu 31 points 1 year ago

Subscene still exists, fortunately

[–] iso@lemy.lol 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Subtitles are the easiest material to pirate :) I'm sure they don't have a copyright either.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ye, but the problem is the ease of discovery

[–] iso@lemy.lol 16 points 1 year ago

Yeah probably all integrations are gonna break 😐

I hate them for injecting embedded ads to subs anyways, so hopefully they ruins the platform more so an alternative can emerge.

[–] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Technically subs are copyrighted as they're usually ripped from official sources. They're selling copyrighted content

[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 8 points 1 year ago

@Moonrise2473 even worse: they're selling copyrighted content that they have no license for

@iso

[–] Metal_Zealot@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

THE BALLS TO EVEN OFFER A "BLACK FRIDAY" DEAL, HOLY FUCK

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[–] lixus98@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I guess this would also affect stremio's opensubtitles addons

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[–] nudnyekscentryk@szmer.info 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

oh fuck no, this kills qnapi and vlsub, doesn't it?

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[–] ruk_n_rul@monyet.cc 5 points 1 year ago

ClosedCaptions.com

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