Today (well, yesterday to be precise, but it’s before bedtime…) was a day of workshops at PttP. Unfortunately, as so often, I couldn’t stay for all of them, as I had people to meet in between things, but what I have seen was really good. Here are some of my impressions.
Read the fine print
This morning I was at a workshop/lecture by Gregor Pryor, who is an interesting lawyer (almost an oxymoron, I know) and partner at Reed Smith. He gave us a great rundown of what we need to look out for when distributing content in the digital sphere. Here are some of the things he said on the subject that I thought would be good to share:
- Blogging and other Social Networking activities imply building a database, so it’s important to do this with a solid legal framework to be able to leverage the contacts you make.
- Intellectual property rights of user-generated content need to be clarified (who owns what, what can you do with user-generated content etc.): only take the rights that you need, you need to state what you’re taking, and make sure that the user-generated content you are using has got he rights to any third party material cleared.
- Also, you need to state how you are going to use the personal data of users, and state your privacy policy.
- Copyright is certainly one of the most important things to worry about – are you going to release your work under a Creative Commons licence, or are you going to go the traditional copyright route?
- This is an oldie, but a good reminder: producer and director own a film in equal shares.
- If you are licencing the rights to your content to a digital distributor, make sure to have “No Warehousing” clauses – meaning that you can take the rights again if they don’t share your content, but just keep it on the “shelf”.
Do It Yourself: Marketing = storytelling
Filmmaker Hunter Weeks, who has been making, marketing and distributing films DIY-style since his first film 10 MPH, held an interesting afternoon session on his DIY marketing and distribution efforts for his projects. He ticks all the boxes in that department. Though his practice isn’t news to me (as it’s exactly what we encourage you guys to do) he said something really important I want to reiterate:
Storytellers are increasingly becoming marketers and micro-distributors.
That is basically the gist if the entire conference – PttP in a nutshell.
I had a good couple of days in London at Power to the Pixel. I’d love to have been at the think tank, I have a suspicion that that’s the best part of it… am therefore curious to read the results of the Think Tank. How did you like it?
