[Tim Vondrell]

It’s crazy what long time video professionals working with big name dropping clients DONT KNOW about copyright law. Ask a photographer! They all know! Clean and simple, if the contract does not state specifically that the client takes possession of the copyright, the creator, or the company he/she works for retains it. Simple. Anything to the contrary mentioned in this thread is only backed up by a specific contract stating certain terms. Good grief, just because you have a contract with company XYZ that says one thing, doesn’t make that the law.

[Tim Vondrell]

Appreciate your post Chris. I was getting sick in the stomach reading all the misinformation completely disregarding copyright law. It’s so odd how photographers will fight tooth and nail for their ownership rights but in the video industry the usual advice is “awww, just bend over and take it. Charge them for the postage. That’ll teach em!”

Seriously there is a lot of talk about maintaining a good relationship with the client, but what I feel about everyone chiming in on this is missing is the fact that most often, that ship has sailed! You probably don’t have a great chance of future work from that client. That’s why they want the footage. To take it to someone else. Doesn’t really matter why they are doing it. Whether the project ended with everyone happy or bad blood, your still for some reason in the situation where they probably aren’t going to be working with you anymore. Now, if you want to protect your image and make sure they don’t bad mouth you, maybe you don’t wanna be a hard#@s. BUT, I think your totally within reason to charge a noticeable and reasonable free for handing over the raw footage. And by that I mean significantly more than a few hundred bucks for your time getting the stuff ready for FedEx and postage. That’s not leverage. No one is going to give a second thought and reconsider whatever it is pushing them to another vendor because your telling them its gonna cost them a few hundred bucks for your duplication time and supplies and postage.

I know a few cases where companies where held hostage by their video vendor because there was nothing in the contract about ownership. So guess who it falls on? The creator. Why does every wedding photographer know this but we are so ignorant of our rights in the video business? There’s a kid where I am that held a real estate agent hostage on keeping him contracted for their video tours by simply not stating it was a work for hire. In other words, the broker gets to post the video tours she paid him to produce but he still owns them. Nice huh?! So when a competitor approaches the real estate broker she quickly pushes them off as this guy has one hand on the self destruct button for the dozens of video tours she has online at any given time. It’s not worth it to her to recreate the wheel with a new vendor. In her head anyhow. Now THAT is leverage. Not that I condone or respect it necessarily. BUT it has saved his @$ s a couple of times and kept him from needing to look for income replacement. Guess who trained him on business practices?? Photographers. Fact.

For whatever it’s worth. I’m currently in a situation where my out of state client has been bought by a much larger company and wants to re edit 8 industry training videos to reflect this name change. I tell them, simple, a grand a video and of course I’m the best man for the job for reasons unnecessary to state. They say…ooo, no, it was an awesome experience working with you but now that we have been gobbled up by the Empire, Lord Vader had his own people that do this work and since they are already familiar with “the brand” we just need the project files and source material from you. The “brand.” Does that make any one else chuckle as much as it does me? What we use to refer to as logo, tagline, color palette. People wanna dress it up now like it’s a secret sauce that takes a marketing genius to learn. I digress. This project was done on a budget and I busted my butt to make the videos look good based on ta promise that I’d make 3 the money in distribution easy. Well, through the fault of a 3rd party my client was dealing with the all distribution thing completely fell apart. So with this in mind, I most certainly am not planning on simply handing over a hard drive of material for postage and administrative fees. Even if the distribution fiasco had not occured, I still plan on charging them a significant fee, probably double to triple what I would have charged to re edit with new logos myself. If there is any chance of still doing work with them at that point, I’ll find out pretty quick. But chances are, as leaders in big company have now become pawns in mammoth company….I’ve got zero chance of working on future projects with them.