 Who Owns the Contents of DVDs?
Occasionally, a subject will come up on the UTBD message board that irritates me so much I am compelled to make a comment. Today, the subject is about a DVD produced for sale from the Spring Fest show in March. Member’s are commenting about the cost, and the quality of the DVD, and one person had the audacity to complain that the producer was gouging the dancers on the price. Here is the rub: Who owns the contents of the DVD? Sulisha has participated in two shows this year where a video was produced, and where the use of the video was not made known to us until after the show. Utah Law states the performer owns the rights to any creative works they produce, and no one with a video camera has the right to take your picture and sell it without explicit consent. Producers of a show, don’t own the creative rights to a show they produce unless waived by the performer. In order for the producer to obtain the rights, he/she must require the performer to waive their individual copyrights. I have never seen a waiver of those rights in any production not produced by us. Additionally, the producer of the DVD for sale, must obtain permission from each artist who supplied the music each dancer used in their performance. This is a clear copyright violation because the producer is in essence reselling the recording of the music. This is a much greater problem than that of obtaining production rights from the dancers, as the artists producing the music have backing from the recording studios, and they have no problem going after small time pirates in the belly dance community. It’s this old issue of copyrights again. It seems the Utah Belly Dancers have such large egos that the desire to appear on a DVD overshadows commonsense. There are those that actually mistakenly believe that anyone’s creativity is up for grabs if you happen to display it in public or in front of a camera, and there are those of the opinion, that one’s creativity is owned by the community, and should be shared by all. Merely by performing in a show does not give you the right to steal someone else’s creative works, and videotaping a show, without a waiver does not give away the rights to produce and sell the video to anyone. The producer of any show that knowingly or unknowingly allows this practice is open to lawsuit where any performer, ending up on such a video, can demand compensation in the form of a one-time payment for damages, or royalties on the sales or both. If Sulisha ever appears in a video produced for sale, without consent, you can plan on a lawsuit, and to avoid these types of problems, Sulisha never gives consent to be videotaped, and we thank those who have honored that request. Sulisha Creations has the policy to produce our own videotapes, and sell videotapes to the group or individual on the tape, we never sell tapes of one group to another. The intent was to protect the creative works of all, and to avoid any possibility of a lawsuit. This created a lot of contention among those who wanted to videotape our events, and those that wanted to buy other group’s tapes. Sorry. There is one more subtle issue in all this---the dancer with the complaints of the costs associated with the DVDs. These ignorant local amateur dancers have no idea of the costs associated with putting on a show so they can wiggle their fat behinds on a stage. We quit doing shows because of the complaints of dancers who don’t want to help offset the costs of producing the show; many are the same people who complain that they lack quality venues to dance. We never made a dime off any show we produced, and we had dancers cheat to avoid paying fees, and then complain about the show---many of which would complain if their ice cream were cold. We projected our shows to break even, not to earn a profit, and they nearly always lost money. Paul Falkner
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