VIMEO T&C's

From VIMEO's Terms and Conditions.

"By submitting your Submission to VIMEO, you hereby grant VIMEO and its affiliates, successors and assigns a worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, sub-licensable (through multiple tiers) and transferable license (with a right to create derivative works) to use, copy, transmit or otherwise distribute, perform, modify, incorporate into other works, publicly perform and display your Submission or any portion thereof, in or through any medium, whether now known or hereafter created. VIMEO shall be entitled to unrestricted use of any Submission for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, without compensation to the submitter."

Pretty aggressive terms by anyones standards. I've had HDV footage ripped from websites and used without permission (so I don't post it now), but I had not realised that by posting to sites such as VIMEO you are actually giving them full permission to use your work anyway they see fit including the sub licensing and using your footage in derivative works without any compensation to you. Just a heads up for anyone that could be potentially worried.

Cheers, Simon

From VIMEO's Terms and Conditions.

....Just a heads up for anyone that could be potentially worried....

Thanks Simon, like most people I just posted without reading, but I expected something like that.

And to add insult to injury, even if you "remove" your posted video, they still have the license to use it for whatever they want, including putting it back up onto the site themselves, or on-selling it.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you have valuable work you want to showreel, host it yourself. Best way to protect yourself. Or just lower the quality to the point where it's watchable but not saleable.

Isn't that a general way for them to say you are allowing us to allow others to embed your movie ?

Isn't that a general way for them to say you are allowing us to allow others to embed your movie ?

Thats what I would have thought also Giles, but if they really wanted your footage then its going to make it that much easier for them to take it.

Stew

Isn't that a general way for them to say you are allowing us to allow others to embed your movie ?

Maybe, but why not say that then? The wording on their terms implies that they can do whatever they want with your footage, whenever they want to, now and forever more. In theory they could sell footage from your videos onto 3rd parties which maybe unlikely but like I said it is a heads up for anyone who may not already by aware of the Terms that they are uploading their videos under. You are basically waving your rights to protect your work, which some if not all people would be extremely concerned about if not already aware of it.

Cheers, Simon

i think you are being a little bit paranoid.

If you go to any individual video settings you see the following:

Who can see this video?

Vimeo respects your videos and your right to decide who watches them. Public videos are available to anyone on the internet. Private videos allow you to choose from the following options (and do not appear on any public listings or search results):

Nobody else means only you will be able to see this video.

My contacts will only be available to your contacts on Vimeo.

People you choose allows you to individually choose Vimeo users who are cleared to watch this video.

Password protected videos will require a password that you choose. You can also embed this video on another site and it will ask for the password there.

All seems a little contradictory if you believe that Vimeo has the right to do what you want with your videos.

All seems a little contradictory if you believe that Vimeo has the right to do what you want with your videos.

Probably more CYA on their part, rather than intention to use the videos.

Paranoid? Well if you feel comfortable uploading then go for it. Like I said this was a heads up for those who would be potentially worried.

Cheers, Simon

Probably more CYA on their part, rather than intention to use the videos.

Maybe, but they could have done alot better job about making it clear and still have more than enough CYA. As Giles pointed out there is other language in other sections of the site which appears to contradict that section.

Later on there is this:

For any Submission that is a video, the licenses granted by you herein shall terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete such Submission from the Site. You understand and agree, however, that VIMEO may retain (but not display, distribute, or perform) server copies of Submissions that have been removed or deleted, and that VIMEO shall have no obligation to attempt to remove from distribution any of your Submissions that are videos that are otherwise publicly available through the Internet or other publicly accessible medium. For any Submission that is not a video, the licenses granted by you herein are perpetual and irrevocable.

So once things are out there they can be pulled sort of, but not really if they are otherwise available still. Interestingly enough they have the same rules for paid and unpaid it looks like (for the most part.)

What happens with most of these agreements is that they are pulled from everything that can possibly go wrong, with language dropped in (often as triage) and the agreement becomes internally inconsistent/questionable. Not saying Vimeo did that one way or the other, nor that the agreement means one thing or another, but sort of my general impression of how things like this develop.

As Drew said, no free lunch (even if you pay for it it seems in this case )