YYeTs (人人影视)

» see yyets.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Every country that watched American television without a legal way to get it grew its own subtitle groups. Turkey's ran on forums and unpaid volunteers, and I knew the shape of that world without ever having been inside one of them. China's grew large enough that the Shanghai police eventually held a press conference about it.

YYeTs started in 2003 with a handful of Chinese students studying in Canada, translating and timing English-language shows for people back home. The letters stand for English TV Shows. It took the Chinese name 人人影视 in 2007, which reads roughly as everyone's film and television, and by the early 2010s it was simply how a Chinese viewer watched anything foreign.

~ the case file ~

~ the yale lectures ~

What it carried went well past entertainment. Alongside The Big Bang Theory and Game of Thrones, YYeTs subtitled ten of Yale University's open courses and released them for free, Shelly Kagan's lectures on death among them. It published bilingual transcripts next to the subtitles, so that anyone using a show to learn English had the original dialogue to work against.

A generation of Chinese millennials picked up a good deal of their conversational English from translators who were never paid and mostly never named. That is the part of the story the court filings have no column for.

~ the first ending ~

YYeTs died once before, quietly. The Motion Picture Association named it in an October 2014 filing as a notable piracy operation, and on 22 November the group announced it was closing. Mainland IP addresses were cut off and the servers went down entirely that December.

The closing note is what people kept. It said the era that needed them had passed and that better channels had replaced them, which was a gracious way to describe licensing deals the group had no part in. The site came back within a couple of years anyway, because the licensed channels did not carry most of what people wanted.

~ the second ending ~

The investigation that finished it started in September 2020. On 6 January 2021 Shanghai police detained fourteen core people including the founder, Liang Yongping, and the Public Security Bureau made it public on 3 February. The figures released were twenty thousand infringing audiovisual works and about sixteen million yuan of revenue, roughly 2.47 million dollars across the group's entire life.

What remained on the servers was cleared on 31 August 2021. Liang was convicted on 22 November 2021 by the Shanghai Third Intermediate People's Court and given three years six months with a 1.5 million yuan fine. The others involved received suspended sentences and fines.

~ the subtitle files ~

On 5 December 2024, three years after the arrests, people from the old group put roughly twenty years of accumulated subtitle work into the open. Plain text files, timed to the frame, for thousands of shows and films that had no legal Chinese release to be timed against.

That is the only part of YYeTs that still functions. The site itself is gone: yyets.com answers a 404 carrying a tracking script for an unrelated domain, which is what a parked and resold name looks like. The translations outlived the thing that made them, which is usually how it goes with volunteer work.

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