Re: The TOS and other issues facing Fan Content Makers

There has been more discussion of the Terms of Use agreement on the Lonelygirl15 web site.
http://www.lg15.com/lonelygirl15/forum/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=12687

by impulse on Sun Aug 05, 2007 6:56 pm

Greg, we need answers here.

"PROPRIETARY RIGHTS IN CONTENT POSTED ON THE SITE wrote:General. You agree that any Content whatsoever posted by you to the public areas of the Site (excluding blogs) you hereby grant to LG15 the non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable universal license to use, copy, sublicense, adapt, transmit, translate, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, and translate such Content as LG15 sees fit."

This is a major issue, I hope you understand that. I made quite a few videos for a fan ARG I'm producing, the London/SF files series, using in each of them original music. I'm not trying to make money out of that, however there is a real ownership issue. Unless we discuss this question and find an agreement, I don't agree to grant LG15 the non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable universal license to use, copy, sublicense, adapt, transmit, translate, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, and modify that music. I could just use copyrighted material I pick up on internet and not create any original content, but I won't. I expect you to tell me if under your terms I have to remove all my videos from the site, or not.

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by Broken Kid on Mon Aug 06, 2007 9:01 am

I ran this by Greg. His response is below. Essentially, you retain all the rights to your work (your own stories, your own music, etc.). However, you cannot profit by using Lonelygirl15 work and ideas.

Greg wrote:"Their own music and own original stories are 100 percent owned by them. Any storylines that use any or part of the LG15 story is what's called a derivative work. Normally, people cannot make and distribute such work. However, we are permitting people to make those videos if they submit them on our website and don't try to profit from them.

The example would be if someone told their own story about on on rogue deacon from the Hymn of One and then started uploading it to their own site and selling ads or sold it as a TV show. That would not be allowed by the TOS.

We love the resposne vids and the spin-off stories, we just need them to be on our site and non-commercial so we don't lose control of our brand and our story."

So to your issue, impulse, you're not giving up the rights to your story or your music. It's only when someone uses the LG15 brand and ideas, that they are agreeing not to profit by that use elsewhere. But they're absolutely encouraged to use those ideas in response videos on the LG15 websites.

Does that help? Let me know if not, and I'll check in with Greg again!

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by immortal1 on Wed Aug 08, 2007 4:21 pm

I don't know if anyone's notice this but I haven't seen anyone who has a fan made character, story or ARG upload to the vid response stream. I think it's fair to say that's not a coincidence.

I've been referring to myself and others as fan content producers. This morning I'm reading an article about KM and they mention UGC or User Generated Content. Could the industry have already defined us? So I did a Google on UGC and TOS and found myself at http://wherearethejoneses.com

Now when the Creators enlisted us to make our own charactes and stories my mind swirled with the potential possibilities. I've championed the cause to get to that place. Imagine my surprise to find it on another site?!

From the Where are the Joneses? YT:
You can get involved in the following ways:
- Influence where the Joneses go next
- Influence the plot, the dialogue
- Appear in the series
- Remix the videos and re-upload to YouTube
- Make soundtracks for the Joneses
- Make animations of the Joneses
- Anything else you can think of!

The Joneses isn't doing so hot. It's a comedy and comedy is hard to write because it's so subjective. Plus I'd bet our talent pool kicks their talent pool's ass! Can you imagine if we had done this first? Maybe the C's would have Ford for a sponsor.

Anyway there are positives 1) it'd a working model to base the fan content/lg15 content crossover interaction on, possibly a separate spinoff story and 2) an existing TOS http://wherearethejoneses.com/help/terms-of-service that when tweaked can be implemented very quickly.