On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 08:44:53PM -0500, Matthew S. Hallacy wrote: > On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 08:08:14PM -0500, David Phillips wrote: > > If you stand up in the middle of a group of people to make a statement, and > that meeting is being videotaped, do you think you have any right to demand > that anyone with a copy of that video tape erase the parts in which you > participated? As someone who worked in Public Access TV, you do in fact have to get everyone who participated to sign release agreements before anything can be broadcast or distributed. We never went on location without a few dozen copies of our standard release agreement. If they didn't sign, they had legal grounds to sue unless we in fact *did* remove all parts that they were in by blurring their faces, bleeping any names, or otherwise removing anything that could identify them. Yes, this is despite the fact that they did see the camera and were speaking right at it. The legal ground comes from not that fact, but the fact that they did not agree to how that footage was to be *used*. If they could prove that it was them and we could not produce evidence of an agreement to distribute, they could sue. The exceptions to the rule are comments from public officials as this is part of the agreement when taking office. Also, city council, senate or even court trials all have a public record keeper present and meetings start by officially announcing the beginning of the public record and the close of the public record at the end of the meeting. Brining the point around to the topic at hand, in the absence of an official agreement of right to a specific use of copyrighted material or transfer or copyright, people do in fact have legal ground to sue. That is if they can also prove that the comments were theirs, which is where the blurring and bleeping comes in. On the note of search engines, subscribing to a service does not give you right to distribute that content. However, only the copyright owner can defend the copyright, so there is nothing TCLUG can do to help said poster in this regard. This whole thing can be avoided in the future if TCLUG simply adds an official agreement to the subsciption process which gives them at least limited right to your material. But then everyone would have to re-subscribe and it would be a real pain. -- David _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list