Copyright and Other Dilemmas

Image from Donnapie @ Tumblr

When I graduated from college ten years ago with a degree in English, I only knew one thing: I wanted to spend the rest of my life working with books. So far, I’ve managed to do it—but with each passing day, it becomes less and less clear whether my industry will still exist by the time I’m ready to retire. And two reasons why book publishing is on such shaky ground are the erosion of copyright enabled by the digital revolution, and the lack of respect it breeds for the services my employer and I provide.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that I’m torn when it comes to fansubs. On the one hand, I love them—they’re for the people and by the people, and often far, far superior to the official subtitles. (See, for example, my fawning discussion of the differences between the subtitles on Coffee Prince’s DVD and the ones created by WITH S2.) On the other hand, I see why the networks and their sanctioned international outlets don’t appreciate fansubs. They’re companies just like the one I work at, and they need to make money to survive. When fansubs are easily available, the dramas’ makers lose control of the product they’ve invested in and are less able to recoup the money they’ve spent.

And when that happens, everybody loses: When you can’t find a decent book to read in ten years because everyone’s self-publishing unedited crap on Amazon, don’t come crying to me. I’m going to be too busy working swing shifts at McDonald’s and falling out of America’s ever-dwindling middle class.

But my sympathy for the makers of Kdramas doesn’t mean that I wasn’t horrified to realize that two of my favorite Kdrama sites disappeared earlier this week: MySoju and DramaTic (z”l). There’s some interesting discussion of what happened on last Friday’s Dramabeans open thread (see the posts starting at 35). Presumably, both sites fell victim to complaints about the legality of their subtitles. (Here’s a site that confirms that Drama Fever filed a cease and desist suit against Google, probably as owner of YouTube.)

I’m as guilty of watching illegally streamed video as the next person, but I only do it when I want to watch something that’s not available from a legitimate source. I happily pay my Drama Fever annual fee (a bargain at twice the price) and am also about to pony up so I can use Hulu Plus on my Roku.

Because I’m a mental midget when it comes to techy things like getting subs and video from different sources and making them work together, watching downloaded dramas isn’t the slightest bit of a temptation for me. This means my relationship with DramaTic has largely been as a reader of commentary—he kept me real. It’s easy to get lost in fangirlish OTP obsessiveness and lose light of things like a show’s objective quality and actual, qualitative merit. DramaTic never did that, and although our opinions differ on a lot of fronts (e.g, I ♥ trendies), the context and sense of history provided by that site have made me an infinitely better, more informed viewer of Korean drama.

I can see filing copyright complaints against My Soju: it is to Kdrama what crack dens are to the real world. But DramaTic? Its owner was only posting translated text files, not video. The ugly truth, though, is that both the words and images that make up our dramas belong to their copyright holders, and they can file suit about abuses against either.

The question is, Why should they? A rising tide lifts all boats. Thanks to fansubs, these dramas reach passionate international viewers the television networks themselves aren’t prepared to exploit—and those international viewers do things like buy DVDs, soundtracks, and ridiculous tchotchkes. (You certainly would not find a replica of the necklace Jun Pyo made for Jan Di in my jewelry box. No, you certainly would not.) When someone fansubs a show, it’s a giant advertisement for not just sixteen (or twenty or a hundred) hours of television—it’s an advertisement for an entire genre. Maybe even an entire nation.

This crackdown on grass-roots support for their product is even worse in light of its fundamental hypocrisy: Guess who subbed the show I’m watching on Drama Fever right now? That’s right…WITH S2. That fansub site is credited at the beginning of each and every episode of 9 Ends 2 Outs—and a lot of other shows that Drama Fever continues to stream. They’re benefiting every day from the efforts of some fansubers, yet they turn around and file copyright claims against others. On what planet does that make sense?

In a lot of ways, this reminds me of the state of American popular music in the early 2000s. As that point, it seemed likely that peer-to-peer file trading would wipe out traditional record labels, and maybe even the music industry itself. But after a lot of regrettable fighting against the people they should have been courting—music lovers around the world—the music industry was saved by one thing: the convenience and accessibility of iTunes. Back in the day, I used Napster and Limewire and Pirate Bay just like every other college kid. But now that it’s so incredibly easy and affordable to buy from legitimate sources, why would I bother to download things illegally? 

With the help of its sales network, the music industry made itself indispensable not by crushing the people who loved their product, but by finding a way to work with them. That’s what Drama Fever should be doing right now: providing a service so good, universally accessible, and complete that fansubs wouldn’t be necessary.

As an English-speaking North American viewer, I know I’m incredibly lucky: Korean networks will do practically anything to get their dramas into my hands and on my TV. The potential market here is huge, and just like the purveyors of Kpop, they want a piece of that pie. But for that to happen, they need to realize that biting the hand that feeds them isn’t going to help.

Imagine how much time someone like DramaTic’s webmaster invested in the many, many hours worth of subs he made available at his site. Instead of having websites like his removed from the Internet, the Kdrama Overlords should thank whatever God they pray to every day for their dedicated fans. 

I honestly believe there’s a way for everyone to win here—why not find it?

Coffee Prince: One Scene Two Ways

Being a complete nerd, I’m acutely aware that any Kdrama I watch is a secondary source, not a primary one. A cadre of subbers will stand between me and the dialogue’s true meaning until I decide to learn Korean (which is unlikely, barring a massive, lightning-strike-induced increase in IQ).

In most cases, this distance from the original doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the drama: as long as the translation isn’t spectacularly botched, the subtitles and the actors working together get the point across. But obsessive viewing of Coffee Prince episodes from many different sources has opened my eyes to another issue: no matter how high-quality the subtitles may be, the subber’s work inevitably colors the meaning of the scene.

In my explorations, I’ve found three distinct sets of subtitles for Coffee Prince: The first is the official MBC version, which appears on the DVD box set and legit streaming sites such as Dramafever and Crunchyroll. The second set are the Viki fan subs, which are almost an exact match with the official version. And the last of the three was fan-subbed by WITH S2 and is available streaming on Kimchidramas and Dramacrazy.

While the differences between the official version and Viki’s subs are minor, Viki’s work is actually superior: it does a better job with English grammar, nailing issues of pluralization and verb tense that are cringe-inducingly wrong in MBC’s subs. But the best of all three sets of subtitles, I would argue, are the WITH S2 subs. They’re more fun, with sharper and wittier dialogue that brings to the forefront story currents only obliquely suggested in the other sets of subtitles.

My initial assumption was that the WITH S2 subs were also the least accurate of the three, because they’re so different from the other versions. But now I’m not so sure—both the official and Viki translations seem to have been cleaned up to make everyone speak in something close to complete sentences. On the other hand, the WITH S2 subs are full of fragments and exclamations that trail off into nothing, which makes them feel much more genuine and compelling. They also retain Korean relationship words like hyung, rather than translating them into their improbable English forms. (“Han Gyul wants Eun Chan to call him ‘bro’? What is this, an episode of In Living Color from 1992?”) Fidelity to the original helps WITH S2’s subbers to bring the drama to life, conveying both the genuine meaning of the words and the skill of their delivery.

Take, for example, the moment in episode 5 when Min Yeop discovers Eun Chan’s gender. It’s a perfect example of what I love about Coffee Prince—it effortlessly serves a number of storytelling functions, and is just plain fun to watch. A lazy writer and director could have produced a flat, textureless version of this scene that would have served the plot just fine. But from beginning to end, it’s clear that this drama is different: I get the feeling that the people who created it were just as much in love with it as I am, and lost no opportunity to turn it into something special. In this scene, multiple story threads and character motivations all interplay, furthering the overarching plot while adding dimension to the relationship of the show’s third leads. Add an everyday, real-world location and some gross-out humor, and you’ve got prime Coffee Prince wonderfulness.

This scene was what initially clued me in to just how varied subs can be—all because of some confusion between chicken and pig’s feet. (Based on the video, it’s clearly chicken feet. But two out of the three subs specify pig.) To make it easier to figure out the differences between them, I’ve transcribed the official subs and WITH S2’s version below the jump.

Lost in Translation

I took three years of French and two years of Latin in high school. Here’s the sum total of what I learned during that miserable time:

1. If a menu item includes the word “fromage,” I should order it immediately.

2. Togas look like they’d be kind of drafty.

3. I could never create subtitles for a television show.

Being obsessed with Korean drama when you don’t speak Korean turns you into connoisseur of subtitles in short order. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad, but it’s always amazing that they even exist in the first place. A number of the dramas I’ve watched on official sites use subtitles provided by the show’s television network, but most of the subs out there seem to be created by fans, working for no personal benefit. How is it that the world is full of people who are both smart and motivated enough to make this happen for us poor suckers who speak only one language?

Keeping this in mind, I try not to get too critical about subtitles. I’m absolutely willing to overlook the fact that the “defected” construction discussed in Prosecutor Princess should actually have been “defective.” (Or maybe I misunderstood and the buildings had moved to North Korea?) As long as the subtitles are clear enough for me to follow what’s going on, I’m a happy girl.

There are, however, some things subbers do that make me crazy. And weirdly, most of them are probably done specifically for the benefit of people like me.

• Reversing Asian names to follow Western standards. By virtue of watching Korean drama, we Westerners have proven ourselves to be open-minded and interested in the world around us. So why do subbers think we can’t figure out that speakers of Asian languages put family names first and given names second? I promise you it’s just as affecting for us to watch Choi Han Gyul and Ko Eun Chan fall in love as it would be for us to watch Han Gyul Choi and Eun Chan Ko do the same.

• Replacing relationship terms or honorifics with names. Ajusshi, oppa, and sunbae may take a little getting used to, but that’s no reason to ditch them altogether in favor of someone’s full name or something like “Mr. Choi.” This isn’t true to the source material and actually works against our understanding of the character speaking—even the greenest of kdrama newbies knows it’s a different thing to call a man “oppa” than it is to say his name.

• Translating basic relationship names. One of the boys in the drama Heartstrings is always referring to girls he goes to school with as “unni,” which the Dramafever subtitles helpfully translates as “sis.” It is absolutely unthinkable that an Western boy would say this word to someone he’s unrelated to, so why not just leave “unni” untranslated? I think it’s safe to say anyone watching this show wouldn’t be put off by the use of Korean—it’s a better option than the English, and the definition is a quick Google search away, after all. (If you do Google it, you’ll even find explanations for why he’s saying unni, a term normally used by girls when talking to other girls. Per the geniuses at Dramabeans, it’s slang for boys to say unni, and probably intended to make the character seem cute and approachable.)

• Not translating written things. I understand that it’s impossible to translate everything, but some subbers really kill me by not bothering to sub text messages, signs, and letters (or, in the case of Flower Boy Ramyun Shop, numerous elaborate diagrams that seem guaranteed to be packed with sources of amusement).

After about six months of watching Kdrama to the exclusion of all else, I could probably carry on a decent drama-level conversation in Korean. (As long as that conversation involved apologizing, confessing my love, and begging someone not to leave, anyway.) But this old dog is unlikely to ever really learn the new trick of speaking Korean, which much to my dismay means that I’ll never be able to fully appreciate the shows I’m watching.

The subtleties of formal versus informal speech in particular seem important when it comes to understanding drama relationships. (See, for example, Dramabeans’ basic discussion of jondaemal and banmal and Electric Ground’s fascinating-but-terrifying explanation of the 7[!] levels of Korean speech.) It's hard to imagine how much intensive study would be needed to even begin to understand the complexities of Korean hierarchical language, especially for a native speaker of English like me. Sure, I don't use the word "dickhead" around my boss (no matter how much I may want to), but beyond that my native tongue doesn't distinguish between individuals by their rank.

So what to do? For now I think I’ll stop complaining borrow a line from the standard plucky Kdrama girl: Please take care of me, subbers!