Killing China’s subtitle sites won’t stop movie piracy. Here’s what will.

Over the weekend, one of my favorite Chinese websites shut down. Shooter.cn, a search engine for mostly fan-made movie and TV subtitles, posted a “goodbye forever” message on Saturday and took all its services offline. On the same day, Yyets, a popular Chinese site for downloading TV shows and films, took some of its services offline for “cleaning up content”. The reason for the shutdowns hasn’t been officially announced, but it is being widely interpreted as an anti-piracy move.

And to be fair, even Shooter.cn – which only offered subtitle files, not actual films or shows for download – does have a clear relationship with movie piracy. A lot of people in China would torrent a popular movie or TV show and then go to Shooter.cn to find Chinese subtitles for it. The site may not have been directly engaged in movie piracy, but it certainly facilitated it.

Its shutdown, however, will solve nothing.

Whence piracy

Especially in film industry circles, the debate over online piracy is often put in financial terms: a film downloaded illegally is equal to X dollars in lost revenue for a film company. But that’s nonsense. Especially in the case of Asia’s movie pirates, the people downloading films would not be paying customers if torrents weren’t available.

As a filmmaker myself, I understand the anti-piracy side of this argument. But at the same time – I guess I might as well just admit this – I’m a movie pirate too. Why? Because often if you want Chinese subs, there’s no other option.

The situation is bad enough in China, where officially licensed DVDs of foreign films with good subtitles are hard to find unless the film was a major blockbuster. More and more foreign films and TV shows are being offered on streaming services like Youku, but there is still plenty of content out there that you’ll pretty much never get in Chinese unless you pirate it.

Outside of China, the situation is much worse because many of China’s streaming sites have region blocks that prevent overseas viewers from watching, and DVDs with Chinese-language subtitles are all but impossible to find. If you think that’s a minor problem, think again: estimates peg the global overseas Chinese diaspora at around 50 million. Not all of them want to watch foreign films with Chinese subs, of course, but even so that’s a lot of people who can’t easily get legal copies of the films they want in the language they want.

Don’t take my word for it; plenty of Chinese foreign film fans have said the same thing. A Phoenix News article about the shutdown, for example, quotes American TV show buff Li Xiang as saying: “I’ve waited a few years to find out the ending of an American TV show I like, but now I can’t watch it. In the future if I want to watch it, I’ll just have to struggle to learn English first.”

Admittedly, there are people who pirate films just to save money, both in China and elsewhere. But especially in Asia, there are also many people who pirate films only because that’s the easiest way to watch the film with subtitles in their native language. Shutting down a site like Shooter.cn is not going to send China’s movie pirates rushing out to the store to pick up DVDs, because they’re not just pirating films to save money. They’re pirating films because it’s actually a better user experience.

Superior subs

Another issue is that the fan-made subtitles available for pirated films and shows are sometimes better than the official subtitles. It makes sense when you think about it: the official subs were probably translated by an overworked and underpaid translator, while fan subs are painstakingly translated by people who love the film or show they’re working on. The result is that the official subs are often just a passable rendering of the script, while the fan-made subs go deeper into the nuances, do things like attempt to imitate local dialects, and sometimes even offer additional notes and onscreen help. For example, good fan subs of comedies often include notes that explain Western cultural references. In complicated dramas like Game of Thrones, the best fan subs even include onscreen reminders when a character first appears in each episode, just in case you forgot who they were.