Rights and clearances
Footage, stills, archive, music and third party material inside something about to be released, and what has to be cleared before it goes out.
Practice
Media.
Film, television, publishing, digital and branded content. Most of what arrives here is a right inside something about to be released that was never cleared, or something already released being used in a way nobody agreed to.
What sits here
Media sits alongside music rather than underneath it. The two overlap constantly, because a great deal of media carries music inside it, but the problems are not the same shape. This work sits mostly on the content and copyright side of what we do rather than the brand side. A programme, a film, a book, a podcast or a branded campaign is an assembly of material made by different people at different times, and almost every difficulty in it comes from one of those pieces having been brought in on terms nobody checked.
What we handle
Contributors and talent
Releases and appearance agreements, what a consent actually covers, and contributors who change their mind after the fact.
Formats and development
Formats, ideas, treatments and pitches, and what protection genuinely exists for them in England and Wales.
Distribution
Licensing content out, and what the rights granted, the territory, the term and the holdbacks really commit you to.
Piracy and leaks
Unauthorised distribution, pre release escapes and redistributed streams, and what removal alone will and will not achieve.
How this usually arrives
Most of it arrives against a date. A delivery date, a transmission date, a publication date, a launch. Somebody downstream has asked for a schedule of rights, and the production discovers that material it has been cutting with all along was never licensed for the use it is now going to be put to. The work at that point is partly clearance and partly reconstruction, and the price of it is set by how little time is left.
The second route is something already released. A contributor objects, a rights holder writes, an archive owner notices their material in a trailer, or the title is being sold into a territory or onto a service that the original permissions never contemplated. Nothing about the material has changed. What changed is the use.
The third is a relationship. A development partner takes an idea elsewhere, a producer and a financier disagree about what each brought, a distributor grants rights it did not hold, or a commissioner and an independent fall out over who owns what was made. Those are decided by what was written at the time, and where nothing was written, by what was exchanged, when, and with whom.
When to spend nothing
Not everything unresolved needs resolving. A production that will never be sold on, a clip used in something with no commercial life ahead of it, a contributor who is unhappy but has no route to do anything about it. Chasing those tidies the file and buys nothing. Raising a lapsed permission with a rights holder who had forgotten about it is a reliable way of turning a dormant risk into a live invoice.
The judgement changes the moment somebody is going to look. A sale, a distribution deal, a broadcaster delivery, an insurer, an investor. At that point the gaps stop being theoretical, because the party on the other side will price them. Doing the work before that conversation is housekeeping. Doing it during that conversation is a negotiation you did not need to have.
Media
What sits under media
Before anything is sent
Positions harden the moment the other side takes advice, and the quiet routes stop being available once a demand has gone out. While nothing has been sent, everything is still open.