Quote:
Originally Posted by alf6300
Paul,
why the bitterness? 
I understand that some people around here are less than gentlemanly towards you, but if you read my original post I was purely asking a rather technical question, that I was genuinely interested in, and I made sure to put plenty of caveats about my lack of experience on content-license transfer (while hopefully knowing a thing or two about shares, having been through a couple of IPOs).
Your answers seem to be constantly trying to start a bar brawl - I am not interested in that.
When people in a bar try to pick a fight with me, I usually try to offer them a beer. If they refuse, I just pay and leave :-)
I respect your personal history, and (while often in disagreement) I occasionally find your posts on this board thought-provoking.
I don't consider you a dick or a clown, I have no reason to. If some people consider you a dick, why not proving them wrong with grace, instead of putting random shit in the fan?
Maybe I am naif and you have your own motives - in any case my offer for a beer when you are around here is always valid.
good luck! |
Let me tell you then how it works more often than not.
The new buyer or old owner contacts me to ask about re-licensing the content. I tell him that it's not a problem, ask him if he's got the paperwork on the content and here it sometimes starts to fall apart. If he has everything, we issue a new licence charge an admin fee to make the license legal and everything moves on.
Or he has a list of content providers and no paperwork, no 2257, no license and no idea who shot what. This is very common, few even bother to send the license back for our signature. We have to go searching for the original buyer, find the orders and sort everything out. This can take hours of work, sometimes days.
We sort it all out and issue new licenses and 2257 info and charge accordingly.
Often the new buyer has been sold
content the original buyer does not own. Part of the price included the content and no word of a license is mentioned. He's looking to buy new content and doesn't want to buy the same scenes again.
We get an email from some one we have never sold to asking for 2257 documents. This happened a lot a few years ago when the law was being amended. So we have to again go through the site to determine who the original buyer was and sort it all out. When we tell the new owner he will get charged for this he gets annoyed as he thinks he already bought the content.
Or we find out from a 3rd party that the site has been sold with the content. The new and old owner haven't told us and the new owner hasn't a clue who show what. Again he thinks he bought the content. Last time we discovered our content being sold like this was via a lawyer defending someone for downloading child porn. The charge was dismissed due to stupidity of the prosecution in thinking a girl clearly over 18 was under 18.
Often 2257 details comes down to a page with a list of content providers with no indication who show what content. Often the content providers listed have gone out of business. So the new buyer doesn't have a hope in hell of sorting it out.
Very often in the above cases we find content being used against the terms of the license. Most commonly by site owners with content not licensed for affiliates distribution, distributing it to affiliates. This revokes the license. You would be surprised the number of people we find doing this over and over again.
The license is quite clear, in the case of of the company or site being sold the transfer of the license is to handled by us. Breaking that term of the license, revokes the license. Therefore the new owner is in fact buying unlicensed content, it's being pirated.
The license is a set of terms two people or companies agree to. For one to ignore them and just carry on as he wishes, because it suits him. Doesn't work.
People are free to contact me when buying content to ask for things that are not included in the license. We will negotiate a fee or rewrite the license.
When you start telling me how it should be and keep on going after me, because of the idiots here who do that. I take it as I did. If a sponsor treated affiliates as some treat content providers. There would be a 3-5 page thread with everyone screaming down the sponsor.
I hope this clears it up for you.