Question on video copyright

[vito]

I'm trying to find out how to legally have the right to display movies on a site. For instance, doing a search at Google Video - http://video.google.com for a subject yields many results. As an example, searching "cow" gives 1285 results. What's the deal with ownership of the videos? If I wanted to display a select number of videos on a site, how would I go about getting permission from the "rightful" owners to display them?

Vito

[Christina]

"Technically" I don't think you need to have any permission since it is "publically" uploaded to a "public" video sharing site like Google Video. It would be very hard to chase down the rightful owners unless you blatantly knew it was the "Happy Cows from California" commercial or you had the $$$ and the legwork to hunt for you. Many sites link to these videos though so who knows!

[vito]

Thanks Christina. In that case, I'm confused. I recall reading several threads about places like YouTube where there was discussion about how they were displaying videos that they did not own, and eventually it would creep up and bite them in the legal a$$. So I just want to make sure I don't set myself up for possible future legal problems.

Aside from that how do you even get the movie file? I certainly don't want to just hotlink to a movie - I want to have the file(s) on my server. I see at Google that you can download some of the videos, but they are in gvp file format that you need to play in their Google Video Player. I just want the Flash files.

Vito

[Christina]

Really? Wow. You could always just shoot the footage yourself :lol: Copyrighted material though for most things always cost a lot of $$$.

You can play the google file, it is a .swf format but you'll just have to embed the code to play, you don't need the Google player. I wouldn't want anything on the Google server on my own server though, the files are user uploaded.

[vito]

You can play the google file, it is a .swf format but you'll just have to embed the code to play, you don't need the Google player.
Sorry, not sure I understand. I downloaded the video file, but it is mvp format, which only plays in Google's Video Player. How do I convert to swf?

Vito

[Christina]

You must click on E-mail-Blog-Post To MySpace (the blue bar) and then select the link for Embed HTML and it will work.

<embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8028841759422417420&hl=en"> </embed>

That's what it will look like.

[vito]

Hmm. So it appears Google invites people to hotlink directly to their videos. OK, that's one option to take. Thanks Christina. :)

Vito

[Christina]

No problem! :)