Who owns rights to a live streamed footage of a concert? I work for a festival in the digital department. I received a request from a documentary filmmaker about wanting to use a portion of a live-streamed footage of our concert. The clip lives on our YouTube channel, which is where the filmmaker came across it. In the contract with the performing band, it stipulates that the festival reserves to right to live stream the performance and place on YouTube in perpetuity, and also that media outlets may use record and use 2 minutes of the performance (doesn't say of the 'livestreamed' performance). It doesn't say anything about allowing a third party to use it for another type of a production (=documentary). My question is: who owns rights to this footage? The festival, the company that did the livestreaming, the band, the band's label? Do I (as the festival) have a right to give permission to use the footage to this filmmaker? If I should refer them to someone else, who should it be? If it helps, I am in Canada, the artist from Columbia, as is the filmmaker who made the request.
Generally speaking, copyright flows from the end of a pen (or at the A/D converter of a digital recording device). However, owning the copyright to a specific artifact, such as a digital video clip, does not trump all the other rights and claims that may be made regarding the materials captured within that clip. Which means that there are several rights all in play at the same time, and those rights may conflict. The legal term for getting enough rights so that you can do what you want with the rights you own is called "clearance" by those in the industry, and "collective rights management" by Wikipedia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_rights_management). The long and short of it is that it is not enough for you to "own" your video clip if you want to use it somehow. Depending on how you want to use it, and your tolerance for risk, you need to get every party who might lay a claim to any copyrighted or trademarked material within your video clip to agree that they are OK with you using it in whatever way you say you want to use it. Sometimes you can ask for, and receive, a "worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to use XYZ material in any way, imagined or not yet imagined". Other times, you might have to settle for more limited rights "a performance of the video at the ABC Bar in New York City, on December 31, 2015 only, for a fee of $10,000 paid to XYZ Rights Holding Company," and agree to a whole bunch of other stipulations to boot. There are entire industries that make furniture and automobiles for Hollywood studios so that they don't have to ask for the rights to feature an IKEA kitchen table or a Ford station wagon in a movie. That's how bad/hard the clearance problem can be. If you are lucky (and risk-tolerant), you might only need permissions from the band and the film maker. If you are unlucky or not risk tolerant, you might need permission from every person captured on camera, and from every company that made every item that appear anywhere in the film. Good luck!
Copyright protection is about certain acts, and not about relationships between products. Copyright law says that the creator of an original work hold the exclusive right to copy and to authorize creation of derivative works. Copyright law does not say that anybody can freely create derivative works as long as they are different to a certain extent. So if you take an original Mario and modify it a teeny bit, that is a violation of copyright; if you take an original Mario and modify it hugely, that is a violation of copyright. Degree of similarity is relevant on some cases when the factual question arises whether the allegedly-infringing work is based on some protected original. This is most obvious in music cases, where all baroque music has some similarity to all other baroque music, all death metal has some similarity to all other death metal, and so on. There is not a legal quasi-statutory standard for measuring substantial similarity in music. The scientific underpinning of such a standard would be based on (weighted) combinatorics and the idea that there are only so many tunes possible (that would be a huge number, until you get to the "within a genre" condition). It seems obvious (by your "admission") that the derived works are based on protected works, so Nintendo's permission is required to legally create such works. However, you do or would hold copyright in your unauthorized derived work. Without a trail of evidence such as a SE question pointing to the connection, the derived images might be hard to connect to the originals. In addition, you may be able to avail yourself of a "fair use" defense, in case you get sued by the original creator. Factors favoring such a defense are the insubstantiality of the copying (a small portion) and the "transformativeness" of your creation.
The opera may be in the public domain, but unless the performance is from several decades ago, which I assume is not the case, the performance is not in the public domain. The video therefore has copyright protection of its own. The use to which you want to put the video does not sound like fair use to me, although as the other answer notes that's impossible to determine without knowing more than you've told us, but the fact that the composition being performed is in the public domain is not a particularly important consideration in the analysis.
There is no such law; copyright secures exclusive rights for the copyright holder (and related rights sometimes secure certain rights for the author which cannot be sold or given away except through death), but it cannot be used to force them to spend money to distribute it in a form that you can conveniently use. Such a rule would defeat the purpose of copyright law, which is to give the copyright holder control over the use of the work, not take away their ability to do so. You can certainly request that they release the work, and can offer to pay them for doing so. But someone who does not own the copyright or any related rights cannot use copyright law to force the person who does own the copyright to spend their own money to convert a show into a new format.
The name can not be copyrighted, but they don't own the rights to the songs and they are telling you they will perform them. They don't want to put it in writing that they are performing songs they legally can't.
I'm pretty sure in France you have moral rights and copyrights. I am writing from New Zealand, but we have some similar intellectual property laws due to being member countries of the World Intellectual Property Organisation. We are also both member countries of the World Trade Organisation (WTO has the TRIPS agreement which relates to IP). So my answer may or may not be right &ndash; check what it says in France's copyright acts: you should be able to search for terms like first owner, and moral rights, films/videos, etc. The school isn't your employer, and so the basic rule is that you as the author are automatically the first owner. Since you're not really at school to create anything or research for the school, I don't think the court would enforce a blanket term that you had to agree to that the school owns intellectual property in what you create. You probably own the copyright. You also have moral rights in what you have created, which means even if the school does own the copyright in your work, you can request they attribute it to you if they show it in public (online). Not all works have moral rights. However, in NZ if you create a film/video you do have moral rights in it.
No. The Creative Commons license seeks to promote recognition of the original author's work through attribution, but does not provide the same framework for enforcement that the DMCA would. The proper approach in cases such as the deleted Wikipedia article and subsequent reuse would be to provide a courteous notice to Wikipedia of your original publication and ask to be listed as the original author or be provided attribution. In the absence of relief there, then what rights you have would be determined by the Wikipedia Terms of Service. Since, and I am assuming here, that you are not generating billions of dollars on the original publication in royalties, seeking to bring a DMCA type enforcement on a Wikipedia article dispute would be like trying to swat a fly with a sledgehammer. (or more commonly in divorce, two people having hearing and spending thousands of dollars on attorney's fees fighting over a blender -- they are free to do it, but they would have been much better off buying 500 new blenders...) Keeping perspective and providing a courteous letter is probably your most cost efficient first step in situations like this. And in all areas of law, just remember, you catch more flies with honey than you do with salt. (meaning taking the courteous approach usually affords better results than a scalding letter breathing hell-fire and brimstone) In followup to earlier comment: Presuming you would be covered by the World Intellectual Property Organization Treaty on Copyright of 1996 (as a U.S. Citizen you would be), and your copyright is on file with the United States Copyright Offices (same presumption) as prerequisite to suit, then there is nothing that prevents you from invoking the protections under general copyright law and under the DMCA (inlcuding the Takedown provisions). Note: these are not the only prerequisites to taking action, but instead the minimum critera to qualify, and note this does not pass on the wisdom of doing so (there are often significant consequences to improperly invoking previsions of certain acts).
&quot;Personal use only&quot; does not excuse copyright infringement under US law. The uploader does not hold copyright, and neither gives nor denies permission to copy his creation. The law does not require a copyright holder to deny permission, it requires the user to actually obtain permission. So no matter how you slice it (even as fair use) it is infringement for you to copy that video.