Comcast Forgets To Delete Evidence It's Using Evil Fansubs In Its Streaming Service

from the oops dept

The war on fan-made subtitles waged by the entertainment industry has been going on for a long, long time. While fansubs could, and probably should, be viewed as a potential boon to the entertainment industry, allowing those in far-flung lands to suddenly enjoy its products, fansubs have instead been painted as an aid to pirated content overseas or, in some cases, as copyright infringement themselves, given that they essentially copy parts of the content scripts.

If nothing else is clear as a result of this introduction, it should be that major industry players absolutely hate fansubs.

... Except when they can make use of them, apparently, as Comcast-owned Swiss broadcaster Sky had been found using fansubs in its streaming service in the dumbest way possible.

Subscribers of the local Sky platform who watch the last episode of the hit series Chernobyl, with English subtitles enabled, see the following message appearing around the five-minute mark. “- Synced and corrected by VitoSilans – www.Addic7ed.com.”

Addic7ed.com is a fansub site. Asked for comment, reps for the site said they didn't care at all that Sky was using their work. Instead, they claim to have started the site to get content out to more people so that specific language wasn't a barrier to enjoyment. Still, it must have been at least slightly jarring to see Sky essentially forget to strip out Addic7ed's signature for its own work. Using someone else's work as one's own by way of copying it is about as close an analogy to copyright infringement as one could get.

Sky, meanwhile, ain't talking.

Sky Switzerland hasn’t responded to our request for comment at the time of publication. Whether the Addic7ed credit was left in intentionally is highly doubtful though. It seems more likely that someone forgot to remove it. In any case, the mention hasn’t gone unnoticed either. At least one person has alerted Sky via Twitter, but the company didn’t respond there either.

It's the hypocrisy here that's worth highlighting, because the industry regularly rails against fansub sites and here is a member of that industry using them in its own product.

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Filed Under: copyright, fansubs, streaming

Companies: comcast, sky