I had been so focused on making the film by this point that I hadn’t really though about the consequences of one major factor. One of the things that really affected me at the start that brought my attention to Buchanan was the freely available ability to view his fights on Youtube. If I hadn’t seen those archive fights I’m not sure if I would’ve really felt how much I did feel that I knew how fearsome and how amazing he actually was, even after being in his company and hearing it from his own words. I knew that whoever posted them had breached copyright laws but the internet was a whole different world to national television and cinema. So I never really thought too much about it, always thinking ‘I’ll deal with that later and it’ll be fine’. Nevertheless I insisted that we go and speak to a solicitor.
We did this and the solicitor told us all about ‘Orphan Works’ as it’s known in the copyright legal world. Orphan Works are pieces of material extending from music, artwork, photography to film, poetry, literature, sculpture and literally any other thing that can be classes as a creative piece that is known for what it is in the world but that nobody knows who created it. She said that many productions go ahead with these in it but will generally have a reserve budget ready to pay for negotiated licences as and when the copyright licence holder surface and claim they own the copyright to the material.
So as a lot of the archive came from these YouTube sourced archive fights we had a lot of ‘Orphan Works’ in the film, around 15 minutes. This was another reason to be extremely nervous from my point of view as an independent filmmaker with no budget.
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