using commercially produced films in corporate video

[Mark Suszko]

You can’t do this legally without getting a number of permissions, which will cost you. Particularly for DVD’s you plan to sell. The process for getting clearances and rights for clips of this nature can be quite rococo and convoluted, and will take a bunch of time.

You could ignore all this and press on, hoping not to get you and the client sued… but I advise against it.

Check out B-Z rights & permissions to get an idea of the scope of the problem and what it might cost to get done legally.

If this is something they REALLY want, another way to give it to them legally is to buy cleared stock footage with that period look, like from WPA archives and the like. Or you can try to parody the originals using brand-new footage.

[Bruce Bennett]

Robert,

With all due respect, you would be crazy to use such footage without getting it cleared first. Legally, you must get reproduction rights from the movie copyright holders. If you don’t, there’s no doubt whatsoever that you are in complete violation of copyright. For corporate video, the use of such footage is rarely worth the high costs of getting reproduction copyrights from the original owners.

Lawyers will go after you and your client. Remember, you can be sued for each and every occurrence of copyright violation. For instance, if you create 500 DVD copies, that’s 500 copyright violations.

Good luck,
Bruce

Bruce Bennett
Bennett Marketing & Media Production, LLC

[Stephen Smith]

I know of a local video production company that was put out of business due to using music they did not own the rights to. Besides, how would you feel about people stealing the disc that is being sold? Getty images sells footage from big name studios and may have what your looking for but I can tell you that Getty images is not cheap. Hope this helps and good luck.

Stephen Smith
Lone Peak Producitons

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