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
Will the real Anonymous please stand up!
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Coat
This will settle, as all cases do, for $1 credit against a year of monthly dues.
Point is not money, but equal access.
Bullshit. It’s always about money.
Was this lawsuit even preceded by a formal letter of protest? One wonders if in these times people just throw out lawsuits if they’re upset about something, not even bothering to notify defendants that they believe something is wrong beforehand, to give them an opportunity to rectify it.
I am certain TONS of contact was made and no changes happened as a result. (just like the Netflix captioning case from a few years ago) Often a law suit is the only way to get executives attention regarding discrimination issues.
I see this becoming a creative issue very quickly, although I can only speak to it from the POV of the production company. We send our episodes to an outside company for captioning according to FCC rules. If there’s a song in the scene and the lyrics are important, then in my mind they should be captioned. If they’re not important though – if it’s meant to be background music, then the act of captioning all those lyrics will detract from the story being told. But who tells the caption company, creatively, what’s important? Right now it’s straight transcription job. The director or producers don’t sit with the captioner or provide notes, and without notes from creative the captioners aren’t supposed to make judgement calls like that. That said, I do think we need to caption as much as we can so that every audience can fully enjoy television and movies.
Who’s to say what is and isn’t “important” — in the minds of most deaf and hard of hearing people, caption EVERYTHING and let them decide what is and isn’t important. (any other decision could be considered paternalistic and audistic).
From the POV of a caption production manager, we have a variety of style guides and types of captions that we do, and typically when we take on a new client who will be sending us work, we hash out the specifications of either the single project or the body of work that will be coming to us. We have our default styles, such as basic FCC compliant captions if we know a show is going to broadcast, or other more basic pop-on if it is going to web streaming. Then our clients will add or adjust rules based on their needs.
I’ll say that in our case, we tend to transcribe everything as a default, but we have so many clients that have told us different positions on song lyrics, that it is a topic we ask about, like profanity, if it comes up and we don’t already have instructions on it. Typically, it seems like the rule of thumb for web streaming is not to include music lyrics unless they’re sung by an on-screen performer or otherwise diegetic music.
The problem is that captioning is farmed out to companies that usually are not provided the lyrics or even the song titles used in the shows. If a company is using a prerecorded song, then they should provide the lyrics to the caption company they use to caption them!
I work for a closed captioning house, we’re fully capable of transcribing lyrics. We’re specifically told not to in a lot of cases, and it has to do with copyright issues.
I don’t understand how it has to do with copyright issues – if that was true, then they shouldn’t be including the audio of the song in the first place…. since ANYONE could illegally rip/record the audio of the song. Having the lyrics in text form does not rob the recording artist or producer of their song rights – nobody buys the movie/CD/album/song track just for the text of the song -_-