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Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API

blog.opensubtitles.com

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Re: Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API

#131

Post by Taek »

danShumway wrote: post #129
crazygringo wrote: post #18

> Your consumer can query the API on its own, and download 5 subtitles per IP's per 24 hours, but a user must be authenticated to download more. Users will then be able to download as many subtitles as their ranks allows, from 10 as simple signed up user, to 1000 for VIP user. > If you wish to offer subtitles without prompting for an opensubtitles account, please contact us and tell us about your project... For an ea…

> It's a question I've never considered before -- should "open" mean "you can API-download everything all the time anonymously no limits", or "you're free to API-download a reasonable amount for consumer purposes with an account, and the more you upload the more you can download"? Neither, Open should mean that the resources are publicly licensed such that they can be freely rehosted or redistributed. It should mean…

Exactly. Open doesn't mean "we will pay all of the bills so that you can enjoy these resources for free".

Open means "we will not take any legal action against sharing and/or modifying these files".

Open projects can have all the ratelimits and paid APIs that they want, as long as they are okay with people setting up mirrors and re-hosting content for free.

Re: Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API

#132

Post by sonicanatidae »

breakfastduck wrote: post #128
crazygringo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely a tricky fair use case, and obviously will depend on each country. IANAL but I'd say the main argument for it being free use is that subtitles don't take away from movie/TV sales. There's no harm. To the contrary -- fan-made subtitles in languages the studio didn't produce might generate purchases where there were none before. While the main argument against it is that it's part of and enables broader…

I mean, lets not pretend that it's primary use case isn't to provide subtitles for pirated content.

Sure, but I don't know a single pirate that decided to purchase media because subtitles were made unavailable.

Re: Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API

#133

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

eamon0989 wrote: post #112
mschuster91 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my feed, a ton of the NSFW subreddits went away, became so low quality that following them was pointless as the mods left or engagement dropped to ridiculous levels, even the OG big tankers. r/gonewild for example has nominal 4.6 million subscribers - but among the default "hot" feed on the first page there's just four posts with > 500 karma, and on the 2nd page there's tons of posts with 80-120 karma. That's ins…

I follow r/europe and I have also noticed a huge change. What once seemed to be a pretty open subreddit appears to have turned into exactly what you mentioned, with vile comments on immigration and Islam on almost every thread. I did start to wonder if people's viewpoint on immigration has changed as the narrative that Europe is "saturated" with immigrants seems to be being pushed a lot at them moment, but I have a f…

It's due to the extreme right wing and other opportunists fear mongering and inflaming people's grievances with an easy scapegoat that cannot defend itself.

Social media of all kinds are effective tools in this. Vilification of minorities works, it always has, but those who would exploit it haven't had access to the public forums required to promote it. Now they have.

Nuclear weapons won't destroy the earth, social media will.

Re: Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API

#134

Post by cantSpellSober »

donatj wrote: post #47
drexlspivey wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you are wrong because a movie script and movie subs are not the same thing at all

In what way? The subs are the script (often translated) + timestamps. It’s the definition of a derivative work. The subs wouldn’t exist without the original work. Edit: Yes, it’s a subset of the script and not thee script itself, and being a pedant about that isn’t a useful point. It’s just pedantic.

Subtitles are sometimes truncated/edited to get them to fit on screen at a readable line length

Things like [ominous music plays] are not part of the script at all, but featured in subtitles

Re: Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API

#135

Post by danShumway »

Taek wrote: post #131
danShumway wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a question I've never considered before -- should "open" mean "you can API-download everything all the time anonymously no limits", or "you're free to API-download a reasonable amount for consumer purposes with an account, and the more you upload the more you can download"? Neither, Open should mean that the resources are publicly licensed such that they can be freely rehosted or redistributed. It should mean…

Exactly. Open doesn't mean "we will pay all of the bills so that you can enjoy these resources for free". Open means "we will not take any legal action against sharing and/or modifying these files". Open projects can have all the ratelimits and paid APIs that they want, as long as they are okay with people setting up mirrors and re-hosting content for free.

And notably there are some "open" services like Doesthedogdie that should not be considered Open even though as far as I know they don't have rate limits on their APIs or force users to log in. They still claim ownership of all of the content, you don't have permission to take that info and mirror it to another site.

Goodreads also springs to mind (although I guess Amazon has started monetizing that now, so it might not be as great of an example). The immediate access matters less to me than Amazon looking at all those user reviews and recommendations and saying, "we own them."

Re: Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API

#137

Post by elaus »

infecto wrote: post #85

Holy batman the takes in this thread are pretty terrible. You can still get full data dumps, you can still use the free API but they are limited the number per period. As a heavy user of OpenSubtitles this change looks completely reasonable for such a wonderful service.

This is the second commend I read from you where you argue that a full data dump is still available for free, so the change wouldn't change anything about the service being 'open' – but it seems to just be incorrect: the only data dump that I can see is meta-data, arguably of not much use for most of the users.

Re: Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API

#138

Post by yokoprime »

infecto wrote: post #85

Holy batman the takes in this thread are pretty terrible. You can still get full data dumps, you can still use the free API but they are limited the number per period. As a heavy user of OpenSubtitles this change looks completely reasonable for such a wonderful service.

No, you cannot get full data dumps

Re: Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API

#139

Post by infecto »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #104
infecto wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even similar, you can still get dumps from OpenSubtitles. But I suspect your comment like many others are from users who don't even really use OpenSubtitles often/ever.

Please, go right ahead and grab one of those dumps to see how useful they really are. It’s just a list of subtitles with download links. > But I suspect your comment like many others are from users who don't even really use OpenSubtitles often/ever. I suspect your comment is a whole load of projection.

If you are going to disagree with my opinion than please disprove what I said instead of dismissing it as projection.

I use OpenSubtitles a lot. You can still freely download subtitles, but their will now be limits on the new REST Api they build. You could in theory scrape the site. You can jump on and download things freely. There might be full dumps including the subtitle text itself out there, I would guess nobody cares given the community around it but thats just a guess.

The move is from I understood over the past year to 1) Deprecate the old hard to maintain API 2) Get applications that are using OpenSubtitles to either introduce a OpenSubtitles link in their app or to work with OpenSubtitles to pay for direct access. 3) Help support continued work on both the site and the API.

The new daily usage limits against the API still allow unauthenticated users from using the API, downloads are limited to 5 a day per IP. Authenticated users but non-paying get a bump up from that, and paying (VIP) users get 1k per day. Is it change from the old API? Yes but my impression is the core user base are happy to support. It costs money to maintain the entire system and you can still download subtitles without signing up. The data is still freely available but the transport, API, has new limitations.

Do you use the OpenSubtitles API or website?

Re: Saying Goodbye to OpenSubtitles.org API

#140

Post by jjulius »

sonicanatidae wrote: post #132
breakfastduck wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, lets not pretend that it's primary use case isn't to provide subtitles for pirated content.

Sure, but I don't know a single pirate that decided to purchase media because subtitles were made unavailable.

I've done it - twice, I think. Downloaded a film in a foreign language, couldn't find subs anywhere.
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