^^ I've seen a lot of soft-subs available outside of the jpop-idol world, and I don't think I've ever heard of subs being stolen. Obviously it must happen, I wouldn't deny that. But I think the problem is probably overblown, and wouldn't be as pervasive as people think. And if I were really that intent on taking credit for work I didn't do, I could easily just set up an RealUreChiissa.com blog, claim to be UreChiissa and who could prove differently? It's not like anybody's got that name on their driver's license. Expropriating someone's internet nick isn't much more work than reediting their srt files. Not to mention, there exist programs such as
SubRip which can extract hard subs with their timings, so they are not an impregnable barrier to plagiarism. Also, as Celedam's example shows, hard subbing something might actually discourage some people from downloading your sub, especially if means redownloading that multi GB+ file they already have an .AVI and H.264 of. So your hard work wind ups with less exposure and recognition than the soft sub would provide. Finally, while both soft and hard subs technically have copyright issues, hard subs present a much broader legal target, and to the same extent that they allow a person to individually "lay claim" to the translation, they also allow the copyright holders to "lay blame" in that regard.
TLDR: Soft subs don't really cause the problem people think they cause and hard subs don't really prevent the problem people think they prevent.
But anyway, I'm not complaining either way.
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