Fee for handing over all footage?

[Todd Terry]

[gary Seabrook] “There was a verbal agreement that the client…”

See, the thing is, you likely DO have a contract there.

What many people don’t realize is that (at least here in the States) a VERBAL contract is just a legal and binding as one on paper. You just have to have the three things that any contract needs, 1) offer 2) acceptance, and 3) consideration… and voilà, you have a real contract.

A yard guy knocks and my door and asks if I need my lawn mowed and says he’ll do it for me for $25. I say sure. There… we have a contract. He made an offer, I accepted it, and there was consideration of $25. Technically that’s just as binding as any contract out there and fully enforceable.

The only real problem with a verbal contract is the fact that it is not provable. Either party can say “No, I didn’t say that, what I really said was….” at any time, with no way to disprove that.

So really Gary, as long as you and the other party agree to those use-it-for-a-year terms and there was consideration, you do have a contract with them. You are well within your rights to give them a ring and ask if they’d like to extend their usage rights for some period of time… and if they don’t, you’re free to remind them that under the terms of their agreement with you that they should stop using the material.

You might even still have some emails or other documentation that would help validate this contract, which does indeed exist.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Neal Petrosky]

Extremely late to the thread but was killing time looking at past subjects.
I have to agree with Todd, but it also depends on how you are hired. Are you a production house that is setting up the talent, location scouting, obtaining permits, doing the filming (or directing it if not physically being an operator), and then editing, finding RF music tracks, voice over, paying these people? If so.. I’d say everything captured is yours (or your company’s) and you should charge a fee for handing that footage over. And even with that, as Todd pointed out, you may have some release issues with handing over footage.
If you’re just getting hired to shoot… of course, but charge more as you’re losing out on the editing side of things.
It all comes down to communication with the client. Don’t tell them, educate them.
For my company, we are 99% of the time the producer… we do everything from concept to final production. We’re still stuck in that middle tier, so we haven’t had too many issues with handing over footage, but we do have it in our contract that there is a fee for us to do that. This is conveniently non specified because I’m not going to hold ourselves to a dollar amount. It depends on the project.
However, I would never EVER hand over any project files (premiere, AE etc…)… those are proprietary, very often contain licensed plug ins/fonts/graphics that they wouldn’t have access to even if we did hand it over.

We also quote our projects based on what the final production is. So no, you are not hiring me to shoot stuff and archive it for you, you are hiring me to deliver a 1x :30 spot (or whatever) and that’s it. Anything else, you pay for.