+44 7426 062307 // alfienewson@hotmail.co.uk // @alfie_films
Still from Charlie and the Chocolate factory, a film that shows how a catchy song can teach kids not to steal from Geese.
26.03.25
Visiting the Yorkshire Film Archive
12:00pm on the 24th of March, I'm sat in an overpriced train seat and when the doors open in Doncaster on its way south, a smell of spring breeze mixes with charcoal. A baby's crying and three women on a hen-do are chatting about social media. It's hard to focus, so I look through Instagram Reels.
“I wouldn't know what was going on in the world if I didn't have TikTok”
Having just met Graham Relton and Ruth Patman from the Yorkshire Film Archive, I wonder where news reports, hen party and home videos will be in fifty years time?
Video is how we inform and entertain ourselves. If a video isn't shared on social media, then it's uploaded to the cloud. That's the name we have for data centres, placed at strategic locations in a network - memory - compressed, encrypted, duplicated and split across non-linear storage arrays. Tiktok and other video platforms make a large chunk of the 200 billion terabytes of memory stored in the world. On this train to London, my digital reel loads through software and satellites to stream in real time. We lease with corporations our personal and cultural memories which float invisibly through the air, like Mike TV in Willy Wonka, half-way between his physical self and the TV-screen.
“Mike, where are you?”
“He's up there, in a million pieces!”
That's one of Graham's worries anyway. Representing Yorkshire Film Archive and North East Film Archive, he runs outreach programmes and community screenings. He says it's been hard persuading people that videos shot and stored on their phone are worth saving in the collection. It might take some time for 2020's footage by Yorkshire locals to emerge as fashionable for Neflix docs and so on, if they ever are; but then again, surely, someone's got to save this stuff.
Bravely recovering from a migraine, Graham comes across as a passionate archivist and a reluctant businessman, which reflects YFA as a charity with split interests. Unlike a commercial library, or an online convenience like Getty, YFA manages everything with a staff of only 6, and digitises according to what material needs saving most urgently - and it can really be urgent. Acetate film is degraded by 'Vinegar Syndrome' and can spread from one cannister to another like a virus, nitrate reels are chemically volatile, and Betamax tapes can be totally written off by minor damage. More often than not, there is only one extant copy of each reel, which ends up travelling from someone's attic or a cupboard, to these chilly, humidity controlled rooms.
One of these rooms is more shabby, there are rusty cannisters piled in groups, some in Sainsbury's bags, Graham points out a box for a chainsaw now with a few reels inside. Taped labels indicate court proceedings, home videos, another one: “Hypothermia”. This a space for unsorted material, waiting for restoration and rights agreements. People no longer own cassette players or film projectors, so they reach out to the archive to make available footage they can no longer access.
With four whole Steenbeck editing tables, staff can see footage and apply new tape at cut points. Spare splicing machines line the shelves as backups just in case the Steenbeck's break, and more importantly, because they look cool.
Graham defends the preservation of true colour from physical film. For this and most other restorative work, YFA hires R3store, a company based in London which is admired for reproducing faithful colours from discontinued stock like Kodachrome and handling popular consumer formats like 8mm and 9.5mm.
Almost tripping out of the film closet, I feel a bit out of my depth.
Film literally begins in Yorkshire. Louis Le Prince shot the first moving images from his garden in Leeds. From 1888, the earliest clip in the YFA is by Le Prince. But with new footage always being processed, the archive is evolving and proudly local. Below videos on their website, researchers have written comprehensive background information, which comes at a worthy cost. Their online platform, Imagen, is another expense that needs justifying to successive Governments which have cut public funding. As the TV industry shrinks, broadcaster budgets have a knock-on effect on the archive. Graham cites the disappearing space for mid-budget shows and the time he reluctantly divides between negotiating licenses for big Netflix vehicles, and artists bringing fresh perspectives to the archive he has worked with for nearly two decades.
On social platforms, YFA clips are often uploaded without credit, which puts the YFA in a tough spot. They want to reach normal people where they're at, but as custodians of celluloid, they also have a right to control how their footage is accessed, and a responsibility to families who entrust them with their material.
Social media has sparing attention for feelings or facts, but as true northerners, people at YFA and NEA are resilient, and will adapt as new archive methods and ways to make money emerge. Visiting in person, it was special to see the reels, and there's still something magical about the technology which makes images move.
14:20pm The tantrum has ended and the hen party got off early.
I walk out of Kings Cross towards Euston, it smells of wee, and my phone loses signal. It's frustrating, but data still flies over my head, debating and broadcasting the present moment, which now seems more precious.
Stills from the films of Adam Curtis, Director of The Power of Nightmares, and ironically a waking nightmare to clear rights for.
04.03.25
Code of Best Practices on Creative Reuse for Documentary Filmmakers
Along with other students taking the Screenskills course on Archive research last month, the heaviest question on all our minds were Footage Rights. How do they work, and what qualifies as an exception to copyright?
As an independent creative, the question of legally using footage is intimidating and a tempting subject to simply ignore until it's be too late.
The silver lining is I’m not alone in thinking this way! Experienced Documentary makers from the UK and the Netherlands expressed similar thoughts during workshops organised in 2022 by Bartolomeo Meletti, Stef van Gompel from the University of Glasgow and the University of Amsterdam.
These creatives identified the industry as a whole as ‘risk averse’, where filmmakers, production companies, broadcasters and content libraries tend to either default to, or require licensing agreements, rather than making commitments to reuse footage with copyright exceptions in mind. Licensing agreements cost money, so the result of this risk aversion may be that films without significant financial and legal backing are less ambitious, less direct with their intent or tragically may not see any kind of exhibition or distribution.
This attitude persists despite there being lawful allowances for reusing video and audio footage without licenses being signed or money ever needing to swap hands.
After their meetings with filmmakers, Meletti and Gompel made a guide for doc makers which aims to bring together generally held concerns by Filmmakers, with the legal frameworks of the UK + Netherlands. Their guide takes us through exceptions to copyright that are ‘common’ and ‘safe'.
I’ve noted down the interesting stuff and added my thoughts below, the full paper is available here. It's worth saying that this post is a summary of an interpretation of law, this is not legal advice, just a way to express my learning and reflections!
FIRST THINGS FIRST
There is a sharp distinction between the ‘ideas’ and the ‘expression’ of a work.
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Ideas can be facts and figures that originate from a piece of work, or the concepts, for example, you could reference an opinion from a political column.
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Expression can be a film clip or written text that is quoted.
“Ideas” are free to use but “Expression” is protected by Copyright.
According to Meletti and Gompel, the foundations of Copyright exceptions are linked to supporting Democratic functions of EU and UK countries. From the introduction:
[Copyright exceptions are] intended to allow uses that are considered to be socially, culturally, economically or politically beneficial, such as education, critique, parody, or the preservation of our cultural heritage, among others.
EXCEPTION 1: Documenting Reality
Incidental inclusion of copyrighted material which is caught in the process of “documenting reality” is legal. This includes things like:
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Logos.
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Buildings and public art.
As long as:
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The amount of incidental material is the minimum needed to tell the story.
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The Documentary identifies its sources and engages honestly with the subject.
PROBLEM
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The paper does not mention incidental music or video. Helped by algorithms, Music Labels are infamous their for heavy-handed takedowns on content which may be incidental.
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The ‘minimal use’ of copyrighted material is very open to interpretation.
EXCEPTION 2: Commentary or Criticism
Commentary or Critique of a work is permitted when the film engages with the material. For example deconstructing or overlaying audio to add new ideas to the original.
As long as
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The new work is not a “market substitute” for the old work. For example if you made a video about James Cameron’s “Avatar” your work should engage and remix the original, so that if someone wanted to buy the film, they wouldn’t buy your work instead.
But
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The original material must be legally disclosed to the public.
PROBLEM
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Investigative pieces which expose new information about people or organisations are on the one hand, the essential for our society’s ability to ‘criticise’ itself, but on the other hand, extremely vulnerable to legal action.
EXCEPTION 3: Art and Pastiche
A lot of Documentary film will not fit neatly into either of the previous exceptions. Art is flighty and dodges description, but artistic reuse of footage can be incredibly exciting and powerful.
Artistic footage reuse often faces a financial and rights hurdle of engaging with much higher volumes of footage for experimental altering, juxtaposition, sampling or collage. To this end, licensing footage would be super impractical, and this kind of artistic engagement with material may not have a clear definition, through the lens of its use, or of its intent.
That’s why there are exceptions in place under artistic “pastiche” which could be a useful keyword to look up in future.
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The authors don't define "Pastiche" in detail so this could be a follow up topic.
EXCEPTION 4: Public Domain
Footage generally reaches the public domain 70 years after the death of the author, but there are too many exceptions to count. (My notes from the Sceenskills course go into more detail).
PROBLEM
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Between the Triad of Broadcasters, Production Companies and Content Libraries, only Content Libraries have an incentive to create roadblocks around material that is in the public domain. Public Domain material may still need to be retrieved and digitised by a library so it can be put into a film.
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The authors only state that the library “should” make these materials available, without mentioning any legal disincentive to these organisations charging a fee.
Meletti and Gompel wrap up with a section on the importance of acknowledging your sources and authors in your work. This is not a requirement in every legal territory, but it is identified as a “best practise”.
REFLECTION
Here the authors are attempting to influence the normativity of footage reuse, so that everyone is broadly aligned and more confident about when to license and not to license.
The law is a concrete response to people’s everyday behaviour, in behaviour there is subjectivity, but the law aspires to make repeatable, justified moral decisions. There is always going to be tension between these two.
Money is normative of course! So it can dictate how and where the law is implemented.
Filmmakers who do not expect to make much money or reach a huge number of people are less likely to run afoul of the law, but law can also be used or influenced by powerful organisations which are motivated and able to weather legal costs.
When organisations choose a target, the law may not be a reflection of justice in society, instead it is a tool for the powerful. As demonstrated in this case from an American creative:
Such was the case for Tia Lessin, a long-time producer for Michael Moore and an Academy Award-nominated director. Her first film, Behind the Labels, exposed the trafficking of garment workers to the Pacific island of Saipan, the only US territory that is exempt from labor and immigration laws. She included a sequence from a commercial by Gap, one of the companies whose clothing was made by those workers and shipped duty free to the US. The legal counsel for Oxygen, the broadcaster, told her to cut it. She couldn’t afford not to. “I didn’t have the resources. It could have been the poster child for fair use. But they were afraid of being sued.”
Judith Matloff writing for Columbia Journalism Review in 2016
Documentary makers are commonly attracted to stories of injustice and wrongdoing, these creatives also often work alone, relying on scarce money from grants and independent investors.
While covering high risk subjects, indie creatives expose themselves to legal and financial risk. So for the benefit of healthy Democracy and Independent journalism, Copyright Exceptions under "Criticism and Commentary" should strongly protect individuals who... criticise and commentate!
Meletti and Gompel give clarity to common areas of legal doubt, but they (intentionally) leave areas open to interpretation, where only an experienced rights or law professional may be able to give relevant and correct opinions.
AFTER THOUGHTS
I am glad information like this exists, but in 2025 I think there is potential for AI powered tools to help non-legal professionals find clarity, if only to fetch relevant quotes, or ask broad and basic questions.
Like with customer service, these LLM 'copilots' could be a bridge between a half-remembered opinion from Reddit, and professional legal advice. The LLM could also recommend reliable sources for legal texts.
19.02.25
CREATe: TV Production: International Trade and Pressures to Consolidate
Alright, I'll admit, the title of this paper could be snappier, but Gilian Doyle here actually frames the large context of the UK Indie TV Production business in an approachable way.
This article was written in 2023 of CREATe: a research group which focuses on varied open issues in Copyright Law, currently based at The University of Glasgow.
Doyle takes a broad survey of the impact acquisition makes on Indie TV Production Companies, and how over the last 40 years or so, the Production landscape has been majorly effected by copyright legislation. Since then, the UK Indie TV world has become evermore effective at generating profits. This is largely thanks to Government regulations drawing clear differences between Broadcasters and Production Companies. From this legislation has emerged a system which has given the UK a fair bit of prestige as a important TV producer.
But the recent suite of larger, often foreign, corps like TIme Warner, Sony and Fremantle, as well as viewing habits shifting to streamers e.g. Netflix, has triggered questions about how legislation should respond to their (potential) stifling effect on competition and creativity.
A surprising find from Doyle's research was that acquisition is extremely positive for Indie Production companies. Acquisition for Indies leads to greater security through financing, more creative ambition, and mitigated risk by being able to run more productions compared to an Indie with no parent. Large companies also offer larger networks and better opportunities for drawing royalties from syndication, which can be the real moneymaker.
Like Tech startups, Indies recognise this, and actually aim for acquisition. They gear themselves to be commercially successful by generating money-making, 'returnable', formats for syndication. Companies looking to acquire new Indies are essentially recruiting 'creative leads' who have proven experience making successful shows in this unpredictable market.
With these heavy incentives, it seems the TV market could then face a problem of becoming monopolised and stagnant, but this is where the regulatory power of Government and Public Service Broadcasters like the BBC or Channel 4 step in.
Key policy measures included the setting up of C4 as a publisher-broadcaster’ in the early 1980s which meant it became an important customer for independent producers and, from the 1990 Broadcasting Act onwards, compulsory access quotas for ‘indies’ on the main PSB channels.
'PSB's especially the BBC actively promote commissions from small Indies
In 2003, the UK Government crucially introduced 'Terms of Trade' where if a PSB commissions an Indie, the Indie will retain rights to their original program and format. This gives extra money making incentive to the Indie separate to the Commissioning budget.
Ironically, now we are seeing "Super Indies" competing with and surpassing the size of Broadcasters, For example All3Media with its 40 subsidiaries and Banijay with over 120.
A point Doyle could have stressed more, is that the renewal of the industry is highly dependent on creative TV Pros feeling confident enough in the stability of the industry to set up on their own.
On a positive note, Inclusive and diverse hiring over the past few years will probably lead to an increase of interesting, culturally niche shows being pitched in the future.
WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE STREAMERS!
A pressing issue for Doyle and CREATe has been the introduction of large Streaming services, which are not regulated like PSBs. Netflix, with it's hefty market share has an aggressive rights policy, often demanding all global rights for shows on their platform. Should their popularity continue to grow, this key issue surrounding IP and Rights may disincentivise indies to develop new formats, and also lead to a wider shrinking of the industry, as new royalties cannot be generated.
The previous Conservative gorvernment very publically considered reducing and cutting state funding for PSB's. But the challenge of creating a sufficiently competitive way to rival the "Indie v Broadcaster model" is an open question for these legislators.
Viewing habits change very quickly, and so Doyle implies rolling back PSB's would be a more risky and short-sighted decision than sticking with the current model.
Wrap Up
To me it's clear that Netflix changed the game by introducing the convenience of streaming prestige shows at low prices, but UK PSB's have now almost completely adopted the same model.
If Indie Production Companies get huge benefits from acquisition including cash-money, I think the same should apply to Broadcasters, which receive funding from our Government here in the UK.
Just like foreign territories, Large Streamers have bought rights from shows like 'The Bodyguard' partly thanks to the creatively risky ideas PSB's are able to promote and absorb as losses, so they in fact need funding instead of cuts to continue making good shows!
Regulation has helped create conditions for the TV sector to grow into a success, so regulation could also limit Streamers ability to hoover up IP rights, which in my opinion, is a strategic error for the likes of Netflix, who are possibly too focused on competing with Disney and other giants of intellectual property.
Film reel found in permafrost in Dawson City, Canada. See the documentary here.
What better place to track my learning about Copyright Law than here eh? As I get to know this topic more, I will add my notes and thoughts.
10.01.25
"The State of AI and Copyright"
A short course on the current state of UK and US copyright law.
To summarise, the legal pros said there is no broad consensus on how AI Copyright issues are legislated, which is - of course - a problem because AI content crosses jurisdictional lines as easily as any other online content, and is currently very hard to spot or trace with certainty.
As of now, there are some differences between US, UK and EU law which are emerging. US law is established case-by-case, the EU is in the process of building a cohesive framework, and guides for risks which companies/ individuals can use. The UK has a finite set of rules, but it is to be seen how the rules will be interpreted in cases starring AI.
Legislating AI content is difficult because it is hard to trace, and also because the applications are so broad across different industries. Different industries have different thresholds of risk. E.g. a robot which uses an AI model to care for medical patients is more risky than a TV show.
I did feel a small amount of frustration with these legal experts happily engaging in "philosophical issues" while sadly, the great heist of the internet has already occured, and is still occuring. As of 2025, the consensus of the general public cannot be formed at the rate of change AI products are being made.
I have seen first-hand how AI prompting can be used to combine unlikely concepts creatively, but it can also be used to narrow the selection of the dataset until the result directly draws from individual artists, similar to how Getty watermarks sometimes appear in AI images. For example, even if a prompt is "a renaissance painting of a 16th century woman smiling." The prompt doesn't mention Leo Da Vinci, but the result is likely to heavily draw from his image of The Mona Lisa.
Sadly for many small creators, legal action is not practical, royalty schemes may pay a small proportion of what their art may be worth, and the broad effect on the freelance market also devalues their work. Ah it's all doom and gloom!
The wild-west of AI Data Scraping is in contrast to the difficulties faced by libraries. The Internet Archive, which is currently facing $600 million in damages in a case brought by UMG, over their distribution of very old 78 rpm recordings. This begs the difference between a Library and a Dataset, and indicates the difficulty of proving and then legislating on if 'gen AI' content is directly theft and what the liabilities should be.
In the case of Docs, I would like to know if copyright is satisfied in one jurisdiction, but not in another, can the show be distributed to that other jurisdiction?
And if an AI work is arguably - or proved to be in breach of copyright, then who would be credited for the work?
Notes:
What is the current landscape of AI in the different jurisdictions?
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We know what the law is but we don’t know how it will be applied in the US because in the cases of copyright, the US work case-by-case.
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'Fair Use' in US is different to UK 'Fair Dealing'
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In the US, Precedence rules - but the UK has a “closed List” to classify exceptions to copyright, for example when it comes to temporary storage, or for non-commercial research
Different jurisdictions?
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EU has a Text and Data Mining exception - where rights holders can “opt Out” from scraping.
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Singapore and Japan allow it to take place
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EU “AI Act” is in a draft stage - it has a "foundation model' - “you may have to publish a list of sources you used to train it” which gives a traceable roadmap for legal accountability.
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WIPO - there is no consensus in IP law
How can creators protect themselves?
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Tech protection - mark your content - e.g. with watermarks and blockchain.
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Prevent web scraping with bots.
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Establish a terms of service.
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Introduce a paywall.
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License work.
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Glaze - prevent AI from reading your images
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Text generation is hard/impossible to trace
The UK has Copyright protection for producers of AI content.
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By someone person who “made the arrangements” which is established by contract.
US “human authorship requirement” means it does not have Copyright protection for AI content.
UK
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History of law responding to technology - legislation covers “time shifting” but not “format shifting” e.g. copying from one format to another.
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But if you’ve made no money there’s no point in going after you - it’s a civil issue.
US
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“Statutory damages” 750 - 150,000 restitution for wilful infringement of copyright. - e.g. Napster lawsuits
UK Economics of LLMs
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How to calculate damages to copyright holders if the information repository is so big? - this is unresolved
US Regulation:
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Child images - deepfakes - how to make sure tech can’t be abused.
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California Bot law - chat bot needs disclosure in election canvassing.
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Banning facial recognition in Law Enforcement. - in breach of the 1st Amendment.
UK Regulation
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Areas of product development need to be regulated for safety.
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Scale - AI is much faster than labour.
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Redrawing boundaries - his position is that “society needs to decide” what the position is on redrawing legal boundaries where AI has changed what’s possible.
UK Humans v machine
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Unintentional infringement is more lax for humans because we aren’t influenced by as large a number of sources.
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Prompting an AI with narrow references results often in infringement
US idea/expression differentiation
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Facts and themes and genres are fair game for reuse, but specific content is not.
Resources
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US National institute for standards and technology
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US copyright office - “ai issues”
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Whitehouse executive orders on Gen AI
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EU’s AI acts - risk management