Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion FoLC Productions Video Clips

Summing up the points so far, as I understand them:

1. Taking an altered clip from someone else's vid without permission is wrong.

2. It may not be obvious if a clip has been altered. Some effects are clear and easy to spot, but others are more subtle.

3. The act of trimming a clip down to its essence (which takes more work and patience than you may realize), even without adding any other effects, may well count as alteration.

4. No one has the copyright to the originals (which involved a lot more production effort, trimming, editing, etc than most vidders will ever do).

5. Reusing clips isn't that great anyway. Odds are the timing won't be right (and, although it hasn't been mentioned, there is a loss of quality associated with making a copy of a copy, particularly when the first copy was saved at a lower, more easily downloadable, quality).

I think we can all agree on 1 and 4. Probably on 5, too. 3 is debatable, but can be reasonably supported. 2 is, I think, a valid point. I know I have, for example, clipped out individual frames or spliced together neighboring scenes in ways intended to make them look like unaltered originals (hiding a transition as nothing more than a seeming change of camera angle, etc).

Another point is that most original clips in videos are no more than a couple seconds long. To keep up with the beat, to keep things interesting, to make the most of what's there, you have to keep things moving. 5 seconds is, in my experience, a really long clip, and 10 is, in most cases, downright unreasonable.

What are the odds that the 2 seconds you picked are the 2 seconds someone else needs? How many people will realize that the 6 second sequence, which may look like an unaltered original, actually consists of 4 seperate clips which were carefully spliced together?

Putting together just a couple minutes' worth of video takes literally hours of work, even without the capture time, and no one but the original vidder will be able to spot every single change made.

Now, that said, I personally (probably) wouldn't mind if someone used clips from one of my vids. Not easy in this case because I do like to add scrolling lyrics (besides concerns for ESL viewers, I personally process words better when I read them than when I hear them), but that's beside the point.

I can, however, certainly understand if another vidder objected to his or her scenes being reused. I wouldn't have thought about it before this thread, but it makes sense to me.

Paul

Personally, it seems a little weird to be discussing digital rights to material which has already broken copyright - ie, all these clips are owned by Warner Bros, surely?

Yvonne

#2 on Paul's list is precisely my main point, and it's why I feel strongly that someone should ask before using a clip from a vid.

Paul wrote:
I do this a lot, and I suspect other vidders do too. It's just one example of a clip that may not be obviously altered, but it's definitely part of the vidder's creative work.

Labby wrote:
The problem is that very few people, if any at all, ever do this. The vast majority of people who are searching for clips this way will simply look at the clip and make a quick judgement about whether or not it's unaltered. They don't take the time to research and find out if it is or not. Even if they did research it, wouldn't it be a whole lot easier to just email the vidder and ask them? That's exactly what I'm saying should happen.
If it's truely an unaltered clip, there probably isn't a way to tell unless you have the vid stamped, like Andrea and some others do with their vids. Like I've been saying, however, it's not as easy to tell if a clip has been altered as one might think. A vidder spends hours and hours looking at the vid, and after all that time, they can almost always (or at least *I* can almost always) tell if it's from my vid or not.

I really didn't mean to cause such a stir with all of this. I just didn't want people to think that it was okay to take someone else's art and claim it as thier own without due credit.

~Anna

Yvonne, I think the point is not the "rights" to the cips, but what is considered the polite thing to do in the vidding community. As Wendy mentioned, many -- maybe most -- vidders here have no experience outside of Lois & Clark. And if, within the L&C vidding sub-community, people like Wendy are fine with others cutting up their videos to use the clips to make new ones, then good for those vidders who have access to Wendy's videos! They've really lucked out and will save themselves a lot of time.

But if that vidder then moves on to another fandom and decides to cut up someone else's video instead of getting the source material directly or asking permission to borrow the clips, and that particular fandom frowns on that behavior (as most seem to), that person is going to find themselves at the wrong end of a lot of hard feelings and wind up hurt and confused over something they had no idea was frowned on elsewhere.

This is the situation that I see this thread hopefully preventing -- it's not just a matter of L&C videos (though there are many vidders here who clearly *don't* want their videos cut up and editted clips borrowed without permission) as much as educating people as to what the accepted norms are in the wider vidding community.

Now you may well disagree about whether those "norms" should exist or not -- just as writers in other fandoms have expressed amazed disbelief when I've mentioned that in FoLCdom, fanfic writers tend to be protective of their titles and prefer not to have anyone to use the same one ("That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!") -- but given that these "rules" are commonly followed outside the L&C vidding community, I think it's important that people in this fandom be aware of it, whether or not we choose to follow it within this fandom or not.

Kathy

Anna said:

But, back to my point, no-one in this entire thread has said that is acceptable. The only thing any of us is defending is the use of completely unaltered clips. Leaving aside the question of how easy it is to tell if a clip has been altered, I think in the majority of cases it's going to be pretty obvious when something is just as it was in the episode and when it's not - so, again, I don't know what the fuss is about.

If videomakers elsewhere object to someone using a single unaltered clip from their videos, then fine - that's their prerogative, I guess. To me, though, given I'd never be able to tell whether an unaltered clip came from my video or another source, that really does sound like telling someone that since I made a video to a particular song, or wrote a story about a particular premise, then no-one else is allowed to use that. I can see that some people don't agree, but that's the way I see it, anyway.

As for what's done elsewhere, every fandom has its own customs, I guess. We're not obliged to follow them, just as they're not obliged to follow us. There's a lot about FoLCdom which is a lot nicer than other fandoms, from what I gather - an Archive where all stories are complete and edited, these boards where people are friendly and welcoming to each other - and, I think, a spirit of co-operation and helpfulness.


Wendy

Wendy said:
Not in the last bunch of posts, no. But in Labby's second post she wrote:
I now understand that she didn't mean altered clips, but I jumped in because I didn't want anyone to think that it was okay to take other people's art. With that last comment in my last post, I just meant that it wasn't my intention to start a big debate, but only to clear up the idea that it's curteous not to take other people's art.

On another note, yes, other fandoms have their own customs and we don't necessarily always have to do things the same way. But like Kathy said, it would be unfortunate if someone learned something here, and then did the same thing somewhere else where it wasn't acceptable.

~Anna

Well, I've seen lots of good points made, here. I do think, though, that until you make a video yourself, it's pretty impossible to fathom what it feels like when people just come along and pick apart your work and salvage the stuff they want.

Would I have an actual, legal right to get angry? Nah. Would I start a riot and start screaming at the person over the internet? No, of course not. Would I lose a little bit of respect for them & their methods? Perhaps.

Okay, hear me out... pretend the show itself is like... a natural spring, high up in the mountains. Nature "owns" the water, nobody (no fan, in L&C's case) can really claim ownership of it. It's there for everybody. So we can all go and get it whenever we want. So I'll take my two buckets and climb up the mountain, fill them, and haul those heavy loads back down to my home so that I can have water to drink. Then imagine my neighbors coming by my house, mugs in hand, asking for cupfulls of the water I worked to get. (Please ignore the fact that water is a source that depletes with consumption and vid clips are not;)). I mean, yes, sharing the water is a neighborly thing to do, and I'd definitely give some to somebody who had no legs and couldn't get the water himself. But if enough perfectly capable neighbors came to my door asking for water, I'd get a little ticked and say "why don't YOU go up the mountain and get your own?"

But anyway, I was giving this a lot of thought today, and in the end, if someone harvests clips from my vids, there's nothing I can do, and there's nothing TO do, and yes, I'm not physically hurt by it. So okay, fine, if someone wants something, whatever, I won't stop them, I won't put up a fuss. I may be miffed, but I won't go psycho on em.

But here's my problem. I see two types of vidders.

Type A -- This person will watch the show and look for just the scene they need. Now they need that clip. Sadly, they're a high school student with no income, or their computer bites and they can't afford one that'll hook up to a video capture card. Or maybe they do have the necessary equipment, but they really need a particular scene from "The Source", yet their copy of it has deteriorated so badly that the clip will look awful. But they know what scene they need. So they'll view dozens of videos, find one that has that scene, and snag it for their own video.

Type B -- They just totally want to make a video to their favorite song. They don't have any way to make caps, and in fact, they probably don't even have very many episodes on tape. But they really love that song, darnit. So hmmm... it could have lots of kissing scenes! Hey, Anna's vids have some kissing scenes, let's grab some from there, oh yes, Wendy's do, too, there we go... who else? And then eventually they have enough, they throw them into a video, maybe trim em a little, and voila.

Type A I can handle. Type B makes me want to scream. Yes, Type B's exist and they have a right to exist, but they still bother me. Maybe I'm just too weird about videos, I just think they should be something well-researched and well-planned and meaningful. But not everyone shares my views. I don't mind Type A's so much because we've all been in a position where one of our episodes looks like crud, so we need a better copy, but in those cases I've always asked my friends first.

It just saddens me because I feel some people who ONLY harvest will not have as broad a base to work with as someone who uses the show itself. There are many moments from the show that have never been used in videos, and you're denying yourself of getting to have a video with clips people haven't already seen a dozen and a half times. If everyone started only harvesting, eventually most of the L&C videos out there would look eerily similar, and that would be a shame.

I generally hate "me too" posts, but I think I'm going to make one this time.