Legal implications using news footage in a....

F

franck

Well-known member
...... music video I'm doing for a reggae artist. It's bound for mtv2 and other smaller networks.
I want to use small sniplets of television news programs about the war... etc.
Is the 2 second rule true? I don't even plan on showing that much, maybe one second of each little clip from like cnn, msnbc, even some stuff from nasa...etc
We're editing the video right now, so before I go any further wanted to know what the legal implications were. Can I use the tv news footage or not??
thanks
 
No, the "two-second rule" is not true. There may be possiblities for fair use, but in a commercial venture, your path is uphill.

You need to consult an attorney in your area with specifics about what you plan to do.
 
Most every network will allow licensing of their news footage through their stock footage divisions. Don't know whether it would be affordable or prohibitively expensive though...
 
yeah got no time to go thru the legal channels and thru network stock footage divisions....
so we'll use some stuff we've done before and downloaded from the internet where its pretty much public domain... random footage of atomic explosions...etc...
 
Be careful!!!!!

Jonathan Demme was talking about his movie "The Agronomist" (it's okay, but not his best work) which is basically just a bunch of video footage, mostly interviews, with occasional news clips provided to give context to the events. The vast majority of it was interviews and stuff, the news clips were really only there to make the rest of it make sense and none of them were that spectacular.

He said that the vast majority of the cost of the movie was lisencing these news clips. The vast, vast majority if I remember correctly. Those news clips probably cost the stations bundles, too: videographers were risking their lives to get them. I would be very careful. Not that you'll necessarily get sued, my guess is that you wouldn't, but the value of those clips may be absurdly high.
 
we'll just take the chance with the little internet clips
if it becomes a problem, we'll just take them off... but I doubt it, they're really really obscure, like a close up of a sperm superimposed with a nuclear blast.... no one will even recognize what is what...
 
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