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Permits required for filming in the wilderness ??
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  • RatLabProductionsRatLabProductions

    Copywrite is used to protect large corporations not artists anymore. Who is buying up mass amounts of patents & rights? Big corporations. Those who try and fight the takedowns on youtube find themselves with the choice of spending hundreds of thousands in legal fees or to give up their rights to their content.

    The fact that we are in a society where some members get preferential rights when it comes to copy right claims is why the system is broken.

    Google patented shooting on a white background. Apple has patented a rectangle. Universal Music has takendown/sued original artists in order to use their work as samples unpaid. Urban outfitters copied an artists entire etsy jewellery line. unless you have $$ nothing you can do.

    Its about $$ and more and more content rights ownership is all about $$.

    I do feel copywrite is needed and it used to protect the artist but the cost of protecting your work is too expensive for 99% of the population.

  • thornthorn

    Copyrights and patents are 2 completely different things. And though many patents are laughable, I highly doubt Apple has received a patent on the rectangle.

  • kurthkurth

    @thorn..one more time...the monkey...obviously is being used as a pretext by wikipedia so they can violate the photographers right to copyright. You...just like that photographer won't win a copyright battle in court against the system. They simply have too many resources. So...if a creator of such and such think that by "being copyrighted" they are protected , they are naive. As I said to bring a copyright case to court cost 10k, if you're the plantiff, out of your pocket ! If you're the defendant , and your contrary is a large corporation, considering it doesn't cost them anything to bring the suit, since they already have lawyers on hand for this sort of thing, and you're most likely floating your own legal expenses....most "cease and desist". the monkey selfie story was odd because this photographer fought the case for like 4 years....and still lost !

  • thornthorn

    The photographer did not lose enforcement of his copyright on the photo. The court found he did not HAVE a copyright on the photo. There is a difference. You cannot win a judgment of theft if the court finds you didn't own the thing to begin with.

  • kurthkurth

    man ...you just go in circles ! I'm not certain but it makes no difference. He lost the ability to copyright a photo that was obviously of his making ! Next they'll award copyrights to the camera manufacturers, because w/o the camera , no photo could have been taken. The photographer did so little. Just push a button here...and a button there....even less than that little monkey ...and the camera does by far the lions share, so let's give copyrights to camera makers next...and let the poor monkey rest ! It will be so much easier ! All photography and video copyrights will be owned by about 12 corps.

  • RottenCarcassRottenCarcass

    How are readers benefitting from this pointless argument over interpretations of photo copyrights and the like? Look at the title of this thread. Here's what's of interest to those likely to hang out here: in practice what does this mean? We're all familiar with 'stealing locations', which happens when you shoot somewhere without a permit. The downside to this is that in some situations, if your footage shows copyrighted or trademarked objects or settings, you can get sued. For example, the Hollywood Sign is trademarked, and if you shoot it for footage that then gets commercial exploitation, and you never bought a permit or licence, you'll get sued by the Hollywood chamber of commerce. But what if you shoot where there is no such issue? Well, the distributor, may still demand that you have releases from all your locations.

    What is interesting here is what happens when you shoot somewhere in the wilderness that's not recognizable like the Grand Canyon or some such place. How is the Park Services going to sue you? Can they prove it was shot at some specific place? If they can't, are you home free to steal locations there? What about the distributor who wants a release of that location wherever that may be? Can you at that point claim that it was outside of some jurisdiction or another, and therefore no release was legally available or necessary? THOSE are the questions of relevance to people reading here. Nobody wants to read your arguments that have no relevance to the readership that frequents film/video oriented sites.

    So, the question is: can we defend ourselves here, or are we screwed unless we have tons and tons and tons of $$$? That's what I'd like to see discussed and I'm kicking off such a discussion with the above questions... so let's dig into it! Thank you!

  • rNeilrNeil

    As noted above, the Idaho Public Broadcasting (wholly state government owned) service has been battling the US Forest Service (who administer some of the massive US Federal Government lands in Idaho) who not only want IPB to obtain permits ... note from the rules, the EXPECT to essentially have prior-to-shooting editorial control also. That's actually been the biggest sticking point in the IPB administration ... as USFS official demanding to see the scripts and program plan before even considering the permit, and ... bluntly giving his "directions" to changes he would have to see in the "direction" of their project before he'd even consider giving the permit.

    In Oregon here, the Feds control something like 52% of the state through ownership of either the USFS, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) or a couple other Federal "entities". We have a very active state-owned Oregon Public Broadcasting service who films a program, "The Oregon Field Guide", which covers the state on both public and private lands showing the wonders of the "natural" habitat, and some of the interesting spots especially in desert-dry & high eastern Oregon where buildings of a hundred years ago still stand all by their lonesome in some failed ranch.

    OPB has made it clear they will completely refuse to submit ANY programming to anyone for editorial review ... period. The Fed administrators here in Oregon published this one day (notably saying they didn't expect much controversy over it) and stated they were now going to enforce it ... but when the state OPB and the large (and very liberal politically) newspaper of Portland took after the story ... and all the TV media in Portland, Eugene, Medford, Bend et al ... the next day the USFS administrators said they'd been terribly misunderstood.

    OPB directly and publicly called them out on their "misunderstood" statement, noting that unless one was a complete idiot as far as understanding common English words, the statement of the rules they were going to fully implement REQUIRED them to pre-approve ALL editorial approaches, commercial or news in scope. Well ... it seems there are now senators & congressional types who want hearings on this ... so maybe it will get held off for now.

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