Use in Corporate movie

[Mark Suszko]

Because somebody put it on youtube doesn’t mean it’s free to use.

The federally-produced instructional film, you might get away with using, since it was taxpayer-funded and also might be old enough, that would probably (but we don’t know 100 percent) be in the Public Domain. A question would be, who put that footage up, where did THEY get it from, and do they have any claims on it? The footage might be public domain, see, but if the specific version is one where someone went to the trouble of cleaning and grading the footage, that version of it might have rights problems attached to it, the same way you can pretty much go crazy with a B&W print of “It’s a Wonderful Life”, but not the colorized Ted Turner version. Try the web site for BZ Rights and Permissions, see what you can find out there.

As to photos of those historic figures, the person who took the photos, or his estate, has the rights to them, or some concern like Getty Images may have bought the rights to that image, and you’d have to negotiate with them for the rights. The first thing you should look for, for those photos you want, is to see of there is a usable free image in the Creative Commons web archive, or in the Library of Congress.

Corporate videos have a long history of appropriating stuff they don’t own, on the theory that the video is for internal use only and will never be seen elsewhere.

Kind of like private, intimate photos and images made by Hollywood movie stars, hm.?

Everything gets out, eventually. The only questions are when, and what the repercussions will be.

[Joe Knapp]

[Mark Suszko] “Corporate videos have a long history of appropriating stuff they don’t own, on the theory that the video is for internal use only and will never be seen elsewhere.”

At my old job, they used a popular song in an internal video. Wasn’t supposed to be seen outside of the conference it was made for. Trouble was, the video was well done, and certain suits wanted to show it to their people. The culture wasn’t much for saying ‘no’, so before you know it, the video was everywhere inside and outside the company. The songwriter eventually caught wind, and Company X had to pay a truckload of money.

This has little to do with using old B&W footage, but at this point, I’ve already typed out the entire story, so I might as well post it. 😉

[Marten Kopp]

Thanks Mark and Joe,

The youtube-link was the fastest way of showing the video. But actually, the linked video was the wrong one. I do want to use some parts of this movie:

https://texasarchive.org/library/index.php/Aircraft_Work_Inspection,_No._5_-_Hardness_Testing_(Rockwell)

And I talking about just 2 or 3 shots of the Rockwell hardness testing method.

Same as the pictures. I would like to use just 2 or 3 portraits of Brinell , Rockwell and Thomas Turner as well as images of a Scleroscope:

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa.8d14573/
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Thomas_Turner_%28metallurgist%29.jpg

@Joe: thanks for your story 🙂 I enjoyed it. And Ill keep it in mind of course.