Familiar Buffalo
On Tuesday, I wrote a post demanding an immediate end to the use of “Better Days” as Buffalo’s official anthem. omeone on Reddit pointed out that some of the images used in the WGRZ Olympic promotion video were lifted directly from CVB videos like “Buffalo: A Sense of Place” and “Buffalo. For Real.” Sure enough…
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In the foregoing images, the one one the left is taken from a CVB video, and the one on the right is from WGRZ’s Olympic promotion. I contacted the filmmaker whom the CVB commissioned to do their videos, John Paget, but he has not responded. Neither a Tweet nor an email to @WGRZ was answered.
I don’t know whether Channel 2 commissioned Paget to do this video, or if it lifted the shots from his productions. But at least the scenes above are identical.
It’s an interesting observation, and on that raises a number of questions concerning who owned the work the CVB (presumably) paid Paget for. Since the CVB is essentially a public agency one has to wonder whether they paid Paget to produce something that he retained ownership of and could resell to WGRZ, or whether the CVB owned the initial production and sold it to WGRZ (or gave it). Or did WGRZ just take it? Obviously there is more to this story.
I’m hoping this turns out to be a non-issue, and we find out that the people who owned the rights (whoever that is) licensed the footage to WGRZ. Unfortunately, the radio silence on all ends seems to indicate this it’s possible that no rights-holder was ever involved. We’ll see.
It’s also worth pointing out that it’s not too uncommon for local commercials to use unlicensed stuff. I notice no one has mentioned the song in all of this. It would not surprise me at all if the song were unlicensed for this commercial as well. (I used to work in TV production editing commercials. Granted, it was a significantly smaller market, but it still amazed me how much unlicensed stuff makes it to air.)
All CVBs have press kits that they make available to media for use in stories that promote travel to their area. I am not sure if this extends to video or not. It could be WGRZ contacted the CVB and asked for permission to use this video.
You should get a hold of omeone.