Invest in Your Love is a reoccurring video contest created to promote tourism to Tahiti. Every couple weeks a new competition is announced and couples can send in videos explaining why the need a free island vacation. Four couples have won so far but I don’t think I’ve posted the results before. The winners are picked by online voting and you can even vote once per day so some videos wind up getting more than 5,000 votes which is pretty ludicrous. Anyway, because the winners are picked in this way, quality entries don’t usually win so they’re not worth posting. But I just saw the latest winning video and I thought it was worth sharing for one very important reason. Here it is:
Kinda cute, right? At the very least it was amusing to see little kids talk about Bernie Madoff and Enron. But it’s sorta of odd that parents would use their kids to get a free trip to Tahiti, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not a free trip for the whole family. Only mom and dad get to go. I’d kind of feel gypped if I were those kids, But I digress. Here’s the thing that really caught my eye. At the very end of the video, for like three seconds, this message appears on screen:
Seriously? All images and music were used with permission? Including the seven or so seconds of the movie Rocky that is shown playing on a TV? (check the 1:16 mark) I just spent 5 minutes googling and I couldn’t even pin down which studio actually owns the rights to that movie. So I’m going to guess that these contest winners didn’t actually clear that footage.
And that is not a small deal. Is it likely that Sylvester Stallone or Warner Bros or MGM or whoever will come along and sue some contest winners from Lexington, KY? Hey…you never know. Did you ever think that you’d see the day when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) would sue 15 year old kids for downloading music? And those kids didn’t even make any kind of profit from their acts of infringement.
Point is, be careful what you put in your contest entries. Maybe you’ve heard the term “Fair Use” but fair use isn’t as fair as you’d think. If you’re shooting documentary and a TV is playing in the background of a shot, that’s not copyright infringement. But if you shoot a video contest entry and deliberately play a well known film on a TV set for a laugh, you technically just broke the law. And if you end your video with a disclaimer saying “all images and music were used with permission,” then some could argue that you are also committing an act of fraud. No….I’m serious. If the rules of a contest state that only entries that don’t violate the copyrights of others are eligible to win and if you lie about the legal status of your entry you are intentionally deceiving the contest organizers into allowing your ineligible entry in to the contest. So worst case scenario, the couple that made this Tahiti video could be sued by the contest organizers, the losers of the contest and whoever owns the rights to the movie Rocky! Oh, and Sly Stallone and Talia Shire since actors are supposed to get paid to appear in commercials/videos/whatever and they are being used to promote tourism in Tahiti without their knowledge. (just look what happened to American Apparel after they put a picture of woody allen on a few billboards in NY without his permission)
As always, the best advice I can give anyone entering a video contest is this: Read and Follow the rules to a T. The use of copyrighted material has sunk the chances of many great contest entries. These Tahiti folks got away with a little copyright infringement but it’s always better to err on the side of caution.
