Both Captain America films, X-Men, Selma, Skyfall, House Of Cards, and The Godfather are among the movies and series accused of discriminating against the deaf and hearing impaired. They are at the center of a multi-claim and civil rights violating potential class action lawsuit filed today against Disney, Fox, Warner Bros, Paramount, Universal, Sony and Netflix over the lack of captioning or subtitling for the films and shows in their home entertainment versions – or, to be more specific, the songs performed or featured within in them.
“While the dialogue of some movies or shows are indeed fully subtitled, the practice of not subtitling song/music lyrics is frustratingly widespread,” said the nine-plaintiff complaint filed in L.A. Superior Court. Seeking unspecified damages and injunctive relief, the complaint seeks to have certification to include all Americans “with any hearing loss and/or impairment” in the proposed class. Recent census data estimates that more 1 million people in the United States are deaf, with many more suffering various stages of hearing loss.
Citing feelings of “frustration and anger” and ranging from California to Virginia to the commonwealth of Massachusetts and Maryland, the plaintiffs allege that such actions by the studios and Netflix are a violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act. “Defendants’ acts and omissions as specified herein have proximately caused Plaintiffs and class members; to suffer a loss of their civil rights — and their rights as a person with physical disabilities to receive full and equal access to the public facilities and accommodations produced and distributed by Defendants,” their attorney John A. Girardi of L.A.’s Girardi Keese says in the class action complaint (read it here). “Such movie or show products were of lesser value to Plaintiffs and class members, than to persons without hearing loss.”
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Adds the six-claim jury-seeking complaintL “Defendant produced and distributed several DVDs enclosed in packaging with language advertising the DVDs were subtitled, movies that were advertised as captioned, and movies or shows with language, such as captioned, English subtitles, or subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, indicating that the movie or show is fully captioned or subtitled. Captions and subtitles allow Plaintiffs and class members, to follow the content of a film or show visually if they are not able to do so aurally. The DVD packaging does not indicate that the subtitles are limited in any way.” And yet, often on the aforementioned projects plus many more from Guardians Of The Galaxy — which had a highly promoted classic soundtrack — to Minions and Interstellar to Orange Is The New Black and the four-decade-old Rocky, the songs are left untitled, like commercials on closed captioning on many TVs.
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None of the studios or Netflix responded to requests for comment on the matter.
Christine Anthony, Susan Boswell, Evan Brunell, Darby Leigh, Ken Levinson, Catharine McNally, Pauline Newton, Jay Wyant And Kristin Zlogar are the plaintiffs in the case
Printing lyrics (even for captioning purposes) requires royalties to be paid to the song’s copyright holders. Producers should automatically include captioning rights (including future streaming/disc/broadcast) when negotiating music for their movies but don’t.
What bs.
Oh woe is me. This bs is getting out of hand. What a tragedy that you miss out on a few lyrics here and there. There are copyright issues at play – why not sue the song publishers and composers as well? Why not try googlng the lyrics if you care that much. Seriously, some people have way too much time on their hands.
Right. So you go to watch a movie like Pitch Perfect, that was advertised as having an amazing sound track. You go sit down, with all your friends, ready to enjoy the movie in the theatre. Lights go down, and then you realize….. there is no sound. Only when the characters are talking that there is sound. You can only understand the spoken dialogue, but not the songs that are being sung because the audio has been completely left out. You realize that all your friends can understand the songs, because they have individualized glasses with captions on them, but because you are not deaf, the sound of the movie was determined unimportant enough to give you, as a person who can fully hear, equal access to the movie. You are told to “suck it up and listen to the songs later on YouTube”. How do you feel?
THIS is how many deaf and hard of hearing people feel when they watch a movie like this – it has captions…. but ONLY for the spoken dialogue, not the songs. When something like 85% of the movie is in song format (Pitch Perfect, In the Woods, RENT, etc) and has no captions other than “[Singing]” or “[Music]”, it is incredibly frustrating, since deaf people KNOW these songs have words in them….. why are they not captioned just because they’re sung and set to music rather than spoken? They’re still words and they still have a message and they are in the movie for a reason…. hence they should be subtitled/captioned.
again, it is about EQUAL access. The same thing hearing people enjoy, deaf people are denied. Movies that are “mostly” captioned are not as enjoyable since sometimes the lyrics are key to the plotline or emotion of the scene.
I am deaf, and I can understand the feeling here. However, as someone mentioned earlier…there are the copyrights laws to get through. After all…not every movie has the lyrics deleted. The movies that has an original score for example, usually will have the captions for the songs. This is because being an original score, the producers of the movies no doubt had the artist signed a copyright waiver, or made some type of extra deal in order to get the lyrics captioned.
What I personally am more disgruntled by is when the captions reads with symbols for the words, such as *#!&# )”*%%*!#$ or so on. Really?Wow..those tv actors must all speak in tongues!
I only have 15% vision in both of my eyes. I could barely read your comment….who do I sue???
What a b.s. lawsuit. The only ones who will benefit from this are the lawyers.