video through TV screen

Fadi

Fadi

Member
Hello

I'm doing a film and I want to do a montage of very fast segments of videos that I got (music videos, TV shows and news). it'll be distorted and no picture should should stay on for more than 2-3 seconds.

I will shoot this through a TV screen as if it's being played on TV.

the question is: what's the risk to get into any copyright issues?

I'm wondering if shooting a TV actually playing the video makes it ok. and I'm also wondering if there is any condition of using a maximum amount of time of a video before it become a copyright issue.


thanks!
 
There is no "time limit" that dictates copyright infringement. If it's on there without permission, you're violating copyright no matter how long the clip is. Shooting through a TV does not absolve you either. All the footages that you see playing in the background of major films are either shot especially for that production or licenses have been obtained for their use.
 
I've used my own content before for this reason, lol. Even if you have a crappy old short film you can put on the TV in the background, you may as well, if you have full rights to the footage and it's yours, so what, your character has bad taste in film, oh well ;) LOL
 
What about "fair use"? Can't you use a few seconds of something for non-commercial purpose without having to license it?

Not that his film is non-commercial, but I thought copyright law allowed for "fair use" in non-commercial works.
 
HAHA, yeah exactly.

But puredrifting is right, it has very little to do with commercial or non-commercial. When I wrote my first non-fiction book, on Star Wars, looking into basically the legalities of that and whatnot, it was considered under copyright law to be "non-commercial, editorial use" of trademarked names, etc. You can write about anything like that, without permission, and cannot be sued reasonably, because otherwise you couldn't have the first amendment right to freedom of speech about items, people, things, places, etc. in the public domain. Regardless of whether Coca Cola is a trademarked name, we can all write about it and weigh in with our opinions about what we think of Coke. I can say that I love Vanilla Coke, or that I hate Pepsi, and I can't be sued for using their trademarked name.

Now if I make my own cola product and call it "Coca Colla" or something like that, I can still be sued even though I slightly altered the name because there is a reasonable assumption that a consumer could be confused by the marketing and that I'm trying to play off and profit from the trademark of another company. That's really why laws like that exist.

It's never to prevent people from writing about things or weighing in with their own opinions, it's just so that you don't go and create your own movie "Star Wars" with a bunch of the same characters.

Even that is a huge legal grey area actually because you can't say which titles for sure are off limits and which are not. While you would never get away with calling your movie Star Wars, or Harry Potter, you may get away with calling it The Hangover, for instance, which would be virtually impossible to protect. Titles are actually in point of fact *never* copyrightable. You cannot copyright the title of a book, a film, anything like that. But the name itself, Star Wars, is a brand entity and can be protected against consumer confusion, and that is what would be tried in court, whether you were creating a similar product that was trying to take advantage of an established brand, creating consumer confusion.

If you released your own film called The Hangover, though, and it wasn't trying to have the same DVD cover, the same plot, etc., it was in fact about a drama where a guy gets drunk and loses his job, his girlfriend dumps him, etc., really a totally different theme, there is no reasonable assumption that a consumer would be confused by your title and you would have every right to use that name.

My friend's short is called The Orphan and it's set during the Korean War. Now there's a major studio horror film called The Orphan, lol.
 
Right, there are many movies as well as songs, books, etc. that have the same title. It's not copyrightable per se. Where it does get interesting though is with iconic titles, and I have to admit I know very little about this. If "The Hangover" is fair game (or a script I recently wrote named "The Collector" which has been used a couple of times before), what isn't? How is that accomplished? Does a filmmaker hire a lawyer to establish their film as a brand name? How is that decided legally? If, let's say, "Star Wars" gets to be a protected brand (seems reasonable), what about "Swordfish", or "The Mask" or "Stripes"? Who gets to join the "protected" club, and who doesn't?
 
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