Video Production Copyright Curriculum
VIDEO COPYRIGHT ISSUES
It is Illegal: TV Torrents: Practical Tips When 'piracy' is easier than legal purchase 2007
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9775271-46.html
Getting out of the restrictive DRM scheme with MIRO http://www.getmiro.com/ then locate an RSS feed like uTorrent, BitTorrent, ShareTV.org or http://www.tvrss.net/shows/ to find a TV show you want to watch. On the web-page for the show, right click on the link to the RSS feed of that show, and copy the URL location. Open up Miro, and go to the Channels menu, and select Add Channel. The RSS address that was copied previously should already be displayed. If it's not, paste it.Miro should now automatically download the latest episode of that show, which it will continue to do every time a new episode appears online. For ease of use, a user will probably want to rename the channel to something recognizable. This can be done by going to the Channels menu and selecting Rename. also see http://tvfreedom.wordpress.com/
YOU TUBE - BROADCAST YOURSELF. If youtube has pulled the video because of copyright violations it is going to turn up on DailyMotion.com located in Paris, where entire TV shows, even series, can be viewed.
Video Content Creators Should Watch Watermarking Test
CopyRight Issues: Use of early recordings for documentary video
Those of you who work with documentary films may be interested in the Documentary Organization of Canada's recent white paper on the chilling effects of the current copyright-clearance culture. Canada has helped with the production of numerous films over the years via the taxpayer-funded National Film Board. Now, many great
documentaries funded through this program have become unavailable due to the expense and potential litigation involved in re-licensing copyrighted elements. See the full document in .pdf form at: http://tinyurl.com/y8b8j9
Douglas Day, M.A., Ph.D <http://www.southernfolklorists.org> asked:
The videographer would like to use excerpts from historic recordings as background or incidental music. While these selections are old spirituals, they are of course of the highly arranged variety. Is it copyrighted? If so, what's the most painless way of getting permission? From whom? What about the advisability of recording local choirs doing public domain material?
David A. Brose Folklorist <http://www.folkschool.org> replies:
[ The first "official" publication I ever did in my life was a 33 1/3" vinyl disc called "Folk Music of Ohio - 1938" that issued (for the first time) field recordings that Alan and Elizabeth Lomax had made in Cincinnati, Ohio in March, 1938. This was an undergraduate student project that myself and a couple of other undergrad's worked on as an "honors" type project. We put out 1,000 records. We were faced with the same kind of situation as y'all on your project, as these were old recordings and the performers were all, in every case, long dead. Any other record, CD, film project or radio program that I have been involved in since has dealt with my own field recordings of still living folks, so it was as simple when "publication" time came as striking a deal with the performers as to what kind of money they wanted, and then (if copyrighted) working through the Harry Fox agency in New York to pay the electronic licensing fees for the songs so that ASCAP, SESAC and/or BMI would be happy. With the 1938 Lomax field- collected material (which we obtained from what was then the Archive of Folksong at the LOC) we were instructed by Joe Hickerson to simply write a letter to each singer or musician that was on the recording (though we knew them to be dead); send the letter return receipt registered mail, and keep a copy of the letter, unopened, when it came back to us, as proof that we had tried to "be good guys" and pay the families or next of kin for the performers. This album came out in 1976. The performers were recorded in 1938. As we did not always have adresses for next of kin, we sent certain of the letters simply to "general delivery-Cincinnati, Ohio." One band was called "The Ft. Thomas (KY) Stringband." We sent their letter care of general delivery, Ft. Thomas, Kentucky ........ you get the idea ........ although you know from the start that these folks are dead, you just do the best you can via mail to attempt to find next of kin and save the unopened letter as proof that you did your best . . . ]
"This might demonstrate that you've exercised best efforts in reaching a copyright holder. While this doesn't qualify as permission, it does seem to be reasonable. An attorney recommended to me that if this course was taken, that royalties for the family or relative of the recording artist be held in account for a period of 7 years." Source
Douglas Day, M.A., Ph.D <http://www.southernfolklorists.org> asked:
The videographer would like to use excerpts from historic recordings as background or incidental music. While these selections are old spirituals, they are of course of the highly arranged variety. Is it copyrighted? If so, what's the most painless way of getting permission? From whom? What about the advisability of recording local choirs doing public domain material?
David A. Brose Folklorist <http://www.folkschool.org> replies:
[ The first "official" publication I ever did in my life was a 33 1/3" vinyl disc called "Folk Music of Ohio - 1938" that issued (for the first time) field recordings that Alan and Elizabeth Lomax had made in Cincinnati, Ohio in March, 1938. This was an undergraduate student project that myself and a couple of other undergrad's worked on as an "honors" type project. We put out 1,000 records. We were faced with the same kind of situation as y'all on your project, as these were old recordings and the performers were all, in every case, long dead. Any other record, CD, film project or radio program that I have been involved in since has dealt with my own field recordings of still living folks, so it was as simple when "publication" time came as striking a deal with the performers as to what kind of money they wanted, and then (if copyrighted) working through the Harry Fox agency in New York to pay the electronic licensing fees for the songs so that ASCAP, SESAC and/or BMI would be happy. With the 1938 Lomax field- collected material (which we obtained from what was then the Archive of Folksong at the LOC) we were instructed by Joe Hickerson to simply write a letter to each singer or musician that was on the recording (though we knew them to be dead); send the letter return receipt registered mail, and keep a copy of the letter, unopened, when it came back to us, as proof that we had tried to "be good guys" and pay the families or next of kin for the performers. This album came out in 1976. The performers were recorded in 1938. As we did not always have adresses for next of kin, we sent certain of the letters simply to "general delivery-Cincinnati, Ohio." One band was called "The Ft. Thomas (KY) Stringband." We sent their letter care of general delivery, Ft. Thomas, Kentucky ........ you get the idea ........ although you know from the start that these folks are dead, you just do the best you can via mail to attempt to find next of kin and save the unopened letter as proof that you did your best . . . ]
"This might demonstrate that you've exercised best efforts in reaching a copyright holder. While this doesn't qualify as permission, it does seem to be reasonable. An attorney recommended to me that if this course was taken, that royalties for the family or relative of the recording artist be held in account for a period of 7 years." Source
ROYALTY FREE VIDEO ONLINE
Royalty Free Video Clips for Classroom Use Internet Archive has a lot of public domain clips. Movies
http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php#Movies
How does a filmmaker document the world around her when the sights and sounds that make up that world are copyright protected? Law professors Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins co-wrote and produced the comic book Bound By Law? Tales From the Public Domain. It explores the legal barriers documentary filmmakers in particular must hurdle, or simply avoid. See the Free Digital Version now. A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? “Eyes on the Prize,” the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this new comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary, and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.
Digital Rights Management
The Digital Video Information Network
My Voice, My Choice: Some Basic Copyright Caveats an article by Douglas Spotted Eagle
Ripping legal video from DVD
Ripping legal video from DVD ~ Daniel Gross, Director Southeastern Wisconsin Instructional Network Group (SWING)
FYI: for approx. $20.00 Circuit City will rip your video for you.
I have some "home made" DVDs. I need to get some short excerpts from them for training purposes. You can not load up a DVD in Windows Movie Maker (or Adobe Premiere, or whatever) and trim a clip. This is what I needed to do.
Previously, I would have had to plug the s-video output of a DVD player into a media converter (I have a Sony DA2, no longer made, but another person suggested a similar product made by Canopus) and then import that
video over the firewire. (Or whatever analog to digital media converter you happen to have. Dazzle is another named possibility.) This involves a big loss of quality.
Another suggestion from someone was to play the DVD on my computer, and use "camtasia" or a screen grabbing program to re-record the video. This too is an unacceptable analog to digital conversion.
What I needed to do was to "rip" the digital files from the DVD, and re-encode them at a different resolution and bitrate (transcode) with a different compression. (AVI works well for the intermediate rip. Although it is large, it is minimally compressed and as such has minimal degradation when you transcode the final product. Ultimately, I wanted Windows Media files for use in PowerPoint.)
Several Mac users suggested that good programs exist for their platform (I don't have access to a Mac) including Handbrake. One user suggested a website that might have software like what I needed: www.dvdhelp.com.
In reality, I found the Handbrake homepage, then used Google's reverse lookup to see who linked to it, and looked for "how to" guides on doing what I needed to do with an emphasis on Windows, not Mac. After trying
several products I didn't like that wanted too much money (>$50), didn't work, or were just generally scary looking, I came across a solution that worked for me - CloneAD's CLAD DVD ripper: http://www.clonead.co.uk/
I needed the cladDVD.NET, avi.NET, AVISynth, and XviD downloads from their download pages.
The other programs would be needed if I needed to further modify, compress and re-encode the DVDs (i.e. COPY them) back to other media. I didn't install them, because that isn't my goal here.
Another poster suggested the DIVX codec. I chose XviD because it was free, although DIVX probably would offer me greater re-compression. (My clips are short, so it's not a big deal.) DIVX is not free. It is also just a codec - it doesn't perform the "whole" function of ripping and converting these files. It just does the final job.
OK. So, put the DVD in the drive, and run the CLADDVD.NET program. It is pretty self explanatory, but it basically copies the VOB files from the DVD to your hard drive. The documentation tells you to do this rather than manually drag and drop the VOB files, as they may not be "sequentially linear" on the DVD. (i.e. You may get various video segments out of order.) It is a reasonably quick process, but takes a lot of drive space.
I suggest you rename the file at this point. Since the same device made my VOB files, they all had the same name, and I got filename conflict errors unless I renamed or deleted the files when I started the second DVD.
Then, run the AVI.NET program. You will have to find the VOB file left from the previous program after you click the source button, and if you renamed them like I suggest, you probably found them at the root of your C:\ drive. At this point, it takes a while as the program starts to pre-process files for a preview. Give it time. When the preview starts, you can click the Video/Audio/Subs button and change output bitrates, sizes or frames - but it's fine to let it use the default settings.
Once the preview starts, click Add Job, and then Start. This confused me a bit, as Start couldn't be used until Add Job had been clicked.
Go away for a long time. My 3ghz P4 HT takes about 2:1 (2 minutes to encode each minute of video). Maybe a bit longer. It makes two passes. In my case, 50 minute videos took 2+ hours to convert.
CLAD suggests an AVI editor, but I found that Windows Movie Maker worked just fine for "trimming" the clips.
Start WMM. Then FILE/IMPORT and find your AVI. (I uncheck the "make clips" so my AVI is one long file, rather than billions of little ones to deal with.) Drag it down to the timeline below.
Move the slider to where you want to split your clip, then under the preview window on the right, find the two razor blades and click. (You can click on and delete the part you don't want. Don't worry, it's not gone from your hard drive, just off the timeline.) Move to the end of the part you want, and use the blade again.
Now out of an hour video, I have my 45 second clip! Choose FILE/SAVE MOVIE FILE, or just "save to my computer" under Finish Movie. Put it wherever you put your training video files. (I have a Training folder in My Documents with a Video and Audio folder that I throw this stuff in.)
Now I can pretty easily import it into PowerPoint as a full screen slide, or put a button on my slide which links to the file and launches my external player if I need to do it that way.
I used WMM because it is easy, and already on my computer. But if I needed to bring clips together, title them, fades, etc I probably would have used something more powerful. (Again, I use Premiere - but no sense
doing that in this case.)
And, I ended up with very high quality finished media clips that I was happy to use in my presentations. It was, however, WAY more work than I really wanted to do to just get a couple of short legal video clips.
<snip>
October 2006 Google bought Youtube.com
2/14/06 Google Video DRM:
Why is Hollywood more important than users? 2/14/06
[...Google DRM and Copyright
Google's DRM has the potential to drastically re-shape the contours of
copyright law, turning a few entertainment companies' wishful thinking about
the way that copyright would work if they were running the show into de
facto laws.
Some examples of user-rights that Google Video DRM takes away:
* Under US copyright law, once you buy a video, you acquire a number of
rights to it, including the right to re-sell it, loan it to a friend, donate
it to your kid's school and so on. But with Google Video DRM, none of this
is possible: your video is locked to your account and player.
* Educators, archivists, academics, parodists and others have the right
to excerpt, copy, archive and use any video in their work, under the US
doctrine of fair use. However, Google's DRM tool stops them from doing this,
and Google's video can't be played on anyone else's tool.
When I questioned Google Video's Peter Chane about this, he said that Google
DRM is "user-friendly" -- but none of the user rights embodied in the US
copyright law are accommodated by Google's DRM. Google's view of
"user-friendly" only encompasses the design of the user-interface, not the
rights that users enjoy under the law.
Revocation and Changing the Deal
Google DRM player can be "revoked" -- field updated without user permission
or intervention. This isn't the standard in media players -- for example,
iTunes requires that you explicitly grant permission to the application
before it updates. Where auto-update prevails, the possibility for abuse is
dramatic -- for example, a magistrate once tried to get ReplayTV to
field-update the units it had sold to monitor its customers' use of the
device as part of a dispute about the legality of one of its features. The
idea was that the spyware would be implemented to gather the information
required for the trial. The owners of ReplayTVs were the potential victims
there, having products they'd purchased crippled after the fact (a judge
overturned the magistrate's idea before it could be implemented, but other
companies, such as AOL, have been forced to field-update their software to
court order).
Google DRM auto-updating raises the possibility that some day the same thing
might happen to them -- either because Google was ordered by a court to do
so, or because one of Google's customers responds to news of Google's DRM
being defeated (Chane and other DRM manufacturers universally acknowledge
that all DRMs will eventually be subverted by their attackers) with a demand
to "update" the software in a way that changes what few rights Google does
give you when you buy your movies from them.
Google won't comment on whether they've entered into any arrangements with
their suppliers that would require them to do this, and there lies the
problem. Your ongoing enjoyment of the property you buy from Google is
dependent on their ongoing relationship with their suppliers. If you buy a
Warner Brothers DVD from Tower Records, it doesn't affect you in the least
if Tower and Warners have an ugly dispute. You've bought it, it's yours. But
with Google DRM, auto-update means that it's never really yours. Third
parties always have the possibility of taking away the rights you bought,
after you bought them.
In other words, your Google movies only play on
Google's player, and no one but Google gets to make a Google player.
This is particularly worrisome in the case of the Google DRM system because
it requires that you have a live Internet connection to Google every time
you want to play a movie. ...] snip
