Wow, what an incredible storm system shaping up that is moving off to the east coast this weekend. Today I got a pretty late start out of the office as I have been working on another major headache of Copyright Violation’s. No I did not nor did my company violate any copyrights but we found several clients and major stock footage companies violating the copyrights of StormChasingVideo.com LLC crews work.
Long story made really short, we sold some footage to a network client years ago and one of their news affiliate’s was The Pentagon Channel. Now that the Pentagon Channel is a US Government entity, most of their work is subject to being Public Domain for footage that is or was shot and produced by government employee’s.
Now here comes the problem, the news B-Roll that was shot was NOT public domain and should have never made it into the government defense department video archives, but it did by mistake. Now the saving grace for them is their own website disclaimer that says ” No Representations or Warranties. DoD makes no representations or warranties of any kind regarding the suitability of using DoD VI for non-DoD purposes. Use of DoD VI is at the user’s sole risk. “
So Doug, what the heck does this have to do with the winter storm? Well I’m getting their. Like I have been writing, I am not posting this to Anti-Social media and saving the good stuff for my personal blog.
OK, to make things more complicated, their are companies that troll the DoD websites for footage to use as public domain and then resell that footage to production companies and the public. Anyone can get the footage from the DoD of the footage produced by the DoD staff for free if they know what they are doing but these companies pull the footage and resell the footage on their websites and several micro stock footage websites.
Going back to the DoD disclaimer, they make NO WARRANTIES… which means if you are going to use the footage, you better contact the DoD and verify rights and clearances before doing anything with the footage. BOOM!!!
So, the footage was picked up and we have found that it has been sold for several years as royalty free stock footage that was shot by the government that was actually shot by my crew and nobody bothered to check the author or ownership of the video with the DoD prior to turning around and selling the footage. WHOOPS!!!
While trying to get out the door to chase the storm, I had to make a few phone calls about this and sure enough, it was labeled by the network as limited license and DoD messed up by posting the footage in the first place but now they are in the process of pulling the material and anyone we catch using the material, which we already have a few which is why I found this in the first place, are liable for copyright violations. So this looks like it could be hundreds of violations we get to track down and go after.
Yeah, my day started off just so fun… Anyway, I was able to get out the door to chase but since I was not almost 2 hours behind my departure time, I had to change my target from southwest Minnesota and head down to Albert Lea, MN for the storm.
While driving south on Interstate 35 from the Twin Cities, it was amazing as to how sharp the cutoff was for the heavy snow. In Minneapolis, MN there was no snow at all and in the southern metro in Burnsville, MN it was just lite snow at the most.
Once I got south of Owatonna, MN is when the heavy snow started to really pick up and just north of Albert Lea, MN is the worst of the snow that I was in for the day and I did not need to go far for my shoot once I was at the intersection of I-90 and I-35. I just passed a wreck scene . It took a few minutes for me to drive back up to the scene and get on the frontage road where I could safely park to document the pile up.
Here is the extended edit from the crash scene footage.
Albert Lea / Freeborn County MN I35 pileup extended edit 1/18/2019