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Yeah, but this is maybe a ten hour job for an amateur using free (OSS) tools, and it's to keep a much bigger investment where it can make money. Estimate about

Yeah, but this is maybe a ten hour job for an amateur using free (OSS) tools, and it's to keep a much bigger investment where it can make money. Estimate about three hours per hour of footage to transcribe, then two to three times the length of the film to sync the subtitles and, if required, embed. You could have knocked it out in a weekend then written a blog exploring what technical and formal steps you took to comply, which would have been a much more apt and interesting topic to see on HN. Calling it censorship is a bit much, but I get the frustrating sentiment that is keeping up with compliance.

lisper 13y ago
It might be a ten hour job for someone who knows what they are doing, but I am not such a person. I have zero experience with closed captioning, so for me to do it myself, not only would I have to do the actual work, but I would also have to climb the learning curve which almost certainly would take more than ten hours. It would make a lot more sense to just pay someone to do it for me (which I will probably end up doing). But that's not the point. The point is that because of a government regulation (one which does not even apply to my film, BTW) I have to pay $500 or lose my distribution. That, to my mind, is the very definition of a "chilling effect on free speech", not unlike a poll tax. It doesn't matter that the amount is relatively small, and that I could easily afford to pay it. It's the principle of the thing. Poll taxes were relatively small too. My concern is actually not so much for my film, but the thousands of titles out there made by people for whom $500 or ten+ hours of work is actually a substantial burden, and the thousands of films that might not get made because this extra burden pushes the producer over the edge to decide it's not worth the bother.

lisper 13y ago

It might be a ten hour job for someone who knows what they are doing, but I am not such a person. I have zero experience with closed captioning, so for me to do it myself, not only would I have to do the actual work, but I would also have to climb the learning curve which almost certainly would take more than ten hours. It would make a lot more sense to just pay someone to do it for me (which I will probably end up doing). But that's not the point. The point is that because of a government regulation (one which does not even apply to my film, BTW) I have to pay $500 or lose my distribution. That, to my mind, is the very definition of a "chilling effect on free speech", not unlike a poll tax. It doesn't matter that the amount is relatively small, and that I could easily afford to pay it. It's the principle of the thing. Poll taxes were relatively small too. My concern is actually not so much for my film, but the thousands of titles out there made by people for whom $500 or ten+ hours of work is actually a substantial burden, and the thousands of films that might not get made because this extra burden pushes the producer over the edge to decide it's not worth the bother.