Over winter break I interned at Lou Reda productions (located in Easton) they’re the mind behind cable documentaries focusing on Vietnam and WWII. The part of the job that pertains to this class was their film archive, they have an archive of thousands of hours of footage most of which is copyrighted. A large portion of their business comes from selling the rights to fair use footage they own. what I gained from this job was what could and could not be sold to other production companies for them to use. Anything shot by the US government was fair game to be sold, this meant any footage shot of USO shows, combat footage and propaganda films could be sold off to other companies. the majority of my job was going through their large archive fulfilling film requests so I quickly learned how to tell what was shot by the Government and what had already been edited by someone else (say the History channel) and therefore couldn’t be sold.
what struck me in particular was that they seemed to have a large amount of footage that couldn’t be used due to copyright laws. When I asked one of my coworkers about this he explained that they saved the footage for when the copyrights ran out it would then be usable and therefore worth it to hold on to.
So I just thought I would share with you my hands on experience with copyright laws and hopefully it will help someone with their paper.
That is really fascinating that you were able to view all this footage and tell which shots were from the government and which had been already edited. It is really interesting that although they can’t use copyrighted footage now, they hold on to it, seeing as when the copyright runs out it will be fair game. Being able to view all of this footage must have been incredible!
That’s such an interesting summer job. If you ever came across a really well documented copyrighted clip would they consider paying the copyright fees to use it?
Yeah, the way it worked to my understanding was if a potential client needed a particular clip and they couldn’t find a fair-use replacement (and if they were willing to pay enough) then they would buy the rights to the footage and then re-sell it.