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Rights and pay question for those of you who have worked with newspapers and online media.
Hello Business and Marketing Community,
I’m an indie filmmaker and seasoned artist working on a series of tiny documentaries interviewing different artists. The docs are 3 min long. It’s a personal project of mine. Currently they’re on Vimeo with tight privacy settings (anyone can view, no downloads, no embeds, no to everything else. Linking was the only option).
An editor of a local weekly affiliated with a national newspaper contacted me about hosting the video series on their website. The pay they offered was super meager, so I asked for double. (I have written print articles for them before. notorious low pay.) They got back to me stating, “My editor won’t budge. He said we could use the vids for free if we waited until you published them elsewhere, which is true I guess but pretty tacky.”
I’ve since changed the vids to password protected. I had wanted to host them somewhere as a series, eventually submitting to festivals, but I don’t want to lose my rights. It’s not news and it’s not a work for hire since I’m making them on my own accord- they would just be hosting them.
Yes, I’d like the “exposure” as a way to draw in some production and editing business, but not at the risk of losing rights. The pay issue suddenly became secondary, but not really.
Can someone enlighten me on this or point me in a direction to find out more?
many thanks,
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5 Replies
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This doesn’t answer everything, but on Vimeo you can control where your video is embedded and lock it to certain domains, at least somewhat preventing them from being freely embedded anywhere.
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If you can see it, you can steal it, using simple screen grabbing tools. Don’t fool yourself that you’re safe from piracy. All you can do about that is make it too much effort for too little return, but you can’t stop a determined thief.
I don’t think they can just publish your work as theirs in quite the way the man suggested it.
But here’s where, if it were my deal, I would make a counter-offer:
Take the crappy pay, but the video stream will run with your logo discreetly embedded in a corner, as in “provided by xyz films”… you keep all the rights and they do not own it except for permission to show it for the duration of time you both agree.
In exchange, besides the crappy pay, the paper will interview you, and run a story about you and this project, alongside or in the same issue as the video, as well as a “backgrounder” piece you or they will write about the over-all topic. One of these articles will have a one-line mention that you can own the documentary series thru Amazon’s video on demand fulfillment service.
This is a triple win for everybody. Everybody gets what they need most out of this deal.
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Wonderful suggestion about the paper running a story about this project. Thanks. I want to make sure it can’t be considered a “work-for-hire.” That also addresses my concern over having my voice as the filmmaker lost in the shuffle.
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The best you can hope for from them is publicity to leverage your marketing efforts elsewhere. You then take these articles they write and blog the heck out of them under your own releases, on your own sites. Now your work will be quotable in Wikipedia, too, BTW, since that is based on published texts. Think the Long Game here. Get the particulars in writing from them first, then go for it. Best of luck!
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“My editor won’t budge. He said we could use the vids for free if we waited until you published them elsewhere, which is true I guess but pretty tacky.”
Sorry, they could use your vids for free is published elsewhere? They do that here in Canada all the time, it’s called stealing. Our national broadcaster did it to be a few times this year alone.
The media have total disrespect for the artists (workers) as if our work was worth nothing, no other industry I can think of works like this, low pay, no pay. Any other trade? you pay the rates for services and materials and it is the contractor that sets the price, same like gas at gas stations, merchandise in stores. Here? the customer/media tell us what they are gonna pay us? Time to END that practice.
On the subject of taking vids for free….this case popped up in the news recently.
https://torrentfreak.com/cnn-cbc-sued-for-pirating-31-second-youtube-video-150813/
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