Recently, the mainland Film and Television website “Renren Film and Television Subtitling Group” was investigated and 14 suspects were arrested. The news has caused netizens to boil over, complaining that the Chinese Communist Party officials do not introduce genuine foreign dramas.
On February 3, the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau held a press conference to inform the public about the case of “RenRen subtitling group” infringement, in which 14 suspects, led by Liang, were arrested. The case was jointly supervised by the National Copyright Administration of the Communist Party of China, the National Office for Combating Pornography and Illegality, the Ministry of Public Security and the Supreme Prosecutor.
Shanghai police discovered in September last year that some people were offering suspected infringing movies and videos for viewing and downloading online through Renren’s subtitle group. The police then locked up some of the suspects through payment QR codes on websites and clients, and last month seized three companies involved in the case, seizing 20 cell phones and computer hosts and 12 servers, involving more than 16 million yuan (RMB).
According to the report, the suspects set up several companies since 2018, set up and rented servers in and outside of China, ran the “Renren Movie Subtitling Group” application and website, downloaded movies through overseas websites, paid about 400 yuan per episode, hired people to translate and produce and then uploaded them, and collected website membership fees and other means to illegally The group has been involved in uploading more than 20,000 episodes of films and videos and has more than 8 million registered members.
On January 4 of this year, Renren released an announcement that it was temporarily shutting down its website to clean up its content, but did not explain why.
Despite the infringement issues involved, the news of RenRen’s subtitling group being investigated was met with a boisterous response from netizens, with more than 500 million Weibo threads being read. The news is that Renren is a representative of domestic subtitling groups that have translated many overseas films and TV shows over the years.
Some netizens pointed out that this is “a new era of closed-door lockdown”, and criticized the low quality of domestic drama, but the mainland platform does not introduce the original, “have cultural film and television confidence, but the introduction of genuine foreign good drama ah?” “Netflix open ah, YouTube open ah”.
But an informed source in the industry broke the news that the operators of the Renren subtitling group not only broke the law, but also did subtitling has turned into a commercial profit-making organization.
While some people believe that the authorities are using this move to show goodwill to the U.S., other analysts say that this is an ideological project aimed at closing cultural security loopholes.
The RenRen subtitling group began in 2003 when a Chinese-Canadian student and a few American drama enthusiasts affiliated with a Korean drama subtitling group formed by Internet translation enthusiasts to form the American drama group “YYeTs,” which is the initials for “audio-visual” and “eTs” for “English TV. The purpose of the group is to share, exchange and learn.
The Canadian-Chinese student later quit due to work, and Liang Liang, another YYeTs veteran, led the team to independently form the YYeTs American drama forum, which was renamed RenRen in 2007 on the principle of non-profit, non-commercial, and free resource sharing. More than a decade later, the group has become a suspect in copyright infringement cases.
In 2014, the Motion Picture Association of America released a report on global audiovisual piracy, which named “RenRen Subtitles”, forcing the veteran group to shut down.
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