Talk:Fan-subbing & translations of copyrighted works without permission - by Si-Jia Mao/@comment-27018138-20151012053024

The first thing that came to mind was Game of Thrones. It's so popular it's watched in different areas all over the world, and there are definitely copies with subtitles in various languages. I know a lot of people who watch this show with Arabic subtitles, and they wouldn't be able to watch it otherwise since they won't keep up with the audio. I kinda see it as beneficial to the series creators..maybe not in terms of profit..I'm not sure if they made more or less money because of this rise in popularity..but it definitely helped spark world-wide interest in the show, and since not everyone has access to HBO, I think the show creators wouldn't have hoped to have a show that was this popular if it wasn't translated into so many languages and made accessible to a much larger audience. So I'd think that yeah, in this case exposure definitely outweighs the free access people have to online versions of the show. I don't think HBO's monopolization of the show would have resulted in such high popularity. Also, even if the show is available on networks like Netflix, it's still not available to a lot of people because it's blocked in some countries. Maybe you'd want to look into how the popularity of this show affected profits...did they make a sh*tton of money they never would have if it wasn't published online for free?

Maybe another topic you could also look into is anime. Anime is definitely available for free online, with both sub and dub versions..though the dub versions usually require English companies who hire voice actors and stuff like that, whereas sub is usually done by fans, though I'm not sure if they get paid for it or not (maybe donations? like horriblesubs ) This would be interesting to look into as well..do the anime creators in Japan benefit monetarily from these fan-subs?

Good luck with your project!