Mark Pilgrim's latest rant, "5½ lessons that legitimate retailers can learn from pirates" is great (as usual) but the most interesting thing to me is learning about the online community which creates user-generated subtitles for movies. Just like Mark says, I had no idea ... but cool!
And after all that, the pirate release is still better. Really. I don’t mean “it’s better because it doesn’t have DRM,” or “it’s better because it’s free (until you get caught).” It’s better because it has unique features that you simply can not find from any legitimate distributor. Look at those subtitles: 11 of them! English, Spanish, French, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and Portuguese. Holy crap, where did all those come from? The original disc only has 3!
Well, they come from people, real people who take the time to translate subtitle files into other languages and share them on communities like OpenSubtitles.org. User-generated subtitles are a massive worldwide phenomenon that most English speakers don’t even know about. Ever since DVDs were cracked wide open, open-source video players have offered the capability to play retail DVDs but display subtitles from a separate file, which you could download without feeling too guilty about stealing anything. Translation quality varies widely, of course, but something is better than nothing. In this release, the pirates have gone to the trouble of locating all those subtitle files for you, and they ultimately provide a “total package” that even the best legitimate distributor can’t match.