Scoopt passes on Queen’s home movies
From the OUT-LAW blog comes news that Scoopt — the site that takes cellphone snapshots and other “citizen media” and tries to commercialize them — decided to pass on some home videos of the British Royal Family that somehow came into its possession. The company apparently decided that publishing the video would have represented an invasion of privacy that wasn’t justified by any “news value,” and also that it might face legal issues.
Kyle MacRae of Scoopt told the legal issues blog: “Essentially it was private pictures and videos of the Royal Family taken for a particular event that through some bizarre sequence of events ended up with somebody who sent it to us.” He said his initial instinct was that the video could be “pretty valuable,” but on further reflection he decided against trying to market it.
“We don’t own the copyright nor do we have any legitimate licence to that copyright, nor does the Scoopt member who sent it to us. Do we have an over-riding public interest story? Is it worth it?”
“In this case it was just completely harmless, it was innocuous, it was nice [so] we weighed all that up and 24 hours later we just decided we weren’t going to handle this.”
Scoopt acts as a broker for people who have cellphone photos or videos, and tries to sell them to newspapers, magazines, websites and other media. The service was set up about 18 months ago, and splits any revenue 50/50 with the owner, who keeps the copyright to the content. One of its successes was the sale of a photo of the airplane that baseball star Cory Liddle crashed into the side of a New York skyscraper last year.
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