Legalicy of videos used for local SEO
-
Hello,
A client of mine wants to use someone else's video (video of how to train your dog) in his pages for "dog training (His City)" The person who makes the how to train your dog videos sells DVDs and that's how he makes his money if that matters.
We want to make sure we're giving the proper credit and doing this OK. What do we need to keep in minds for legalities and respecting the author?
Thanks.
-
There have been several high profile law suits over theft of web content
-
Julie and EGOL,
Some excellent information, and useful for protecting my own stuff as I grow! My client's wife happens to be an attorney and she said exactly what both of you said.
Thanks.
-
There is a whole new industry growing of people who look for illegal use of photos, copy, videos etc. so that they can sue.
This is very true. I have gotten intellectual property consultations from multipe attorneys because people have been using my property in violation of copyright law. They would be glad to help me build a situation where I can start suing. Although I have not gone that route, I have been attacking infringers at scale, filing DMCA with Google, web hosts and Adsense. If you kill their SERP visibility, get them kicked off of hosts and their Adsense accounts turned off, they stop using your stuff. Once you get a system for submitting DMCA at scale it takes surprisingly little time - we complained against nearly 200 domains in 2016 - but you better know the difference between infringement and fair use.
-
I researched this for a former client (he quit me when he didn't like my answer) and the risk to using another's intellectual property is high.
If you publish, whether it's a book or a website, you must 1) create it yourself, 2) pay for it yourself or 3) have written permission from the author. Without that you are risking huge penalties if caught. There is a whole new industry growing of people who look for illegal use of photos, copy, videos etc. so that they can sue.
P.S. I'm not sad about losing that client.
-
You are completely right EGOL, in many ways. We will be very careful.
-
This is a legal question and I am not an attorney. So, what I write here is amateur kibitzing and personal opinion.
If I was the person who wanted to use the videos of another person, I would contact that person and ask for written permission. Proper permission will include who you are, why you want to use the videos, what domain you want to post the videos on, a sample of the page where they will be displayed, how long you want to use them and any other information that might influence the owner to say "yes" and especially any information that would influence the owner to say "no". Failure to do this can get you into serious legal trouble. If the owner of the videos has done all of the legal homework, your client could be sued for $150,000 for infringement - without the owner of the videos being required to demonstrate that the infringement has caused damage.
If the owner is making money from these videos, even if it isn't serious money, he/she will probably tell anyone who wants to use them how much money must be paid for a license fee or simply tell them "no".
Really, if your client has a website about dog training, he should be making his own videos. This is best practice because it showcases the client's work, builds credibility with people who want their dogs trained, and the videos can be perfectly customized to the clients business, style, personality and location.
But, if the client is intent on using the videos of another person, he/she should get advice from an attorney who is qualified in copyright law instead of from people in an SEO forum - I sure would not go to a legal forum for SEO advice From my experience, the cost of good legal advice is a lot less than most people fear and more valuable than most people imagine.
This is all of the information that I am able to provide on this matter. Hope your client finds something that works perfectly.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved GMB Local SEO question
I am trying to diagnose how one particular competitor is smoking us in local rankings. I came across a text field “Service Details' within Google My Business Services. This allows me to put in a brief description of each service we offer. My thought is that this could be a good place for keywords. That said, the descriptions are not public facing (or to the best of my knowledge) so I am reluctant to do all the work for nothing. I am wondering if anyone has filled these out and if there were any noticeable results. Any insight is appreciated
Local SEO | | jorda0910 -
Effective Real Estate SEO Strategies
I am looking to increase organic traffic to our Real Estate website, and am looking for any suggestions and or feedback as to strategies to implement in this area or even the must-have SEO pages every real-estate business should build. Interested in attracting sellers & buyers, but obviously would love more to attract sellers... The issue with that being you have to outrank the massive sites like Zillow and Realtor. Some ideas I have so far. Building out Neighbourhood pages to rank for people searching for 'Neighbourhood name' Any feedback on this one greatly appreciate. What's {city name} like? {Neighbourhood name} houses for sale What are good areas of {city name} Is {city name} a good place to live? What's {city name} like? What __ are in {city name} restaraunts hospitals beaches colleges How is {city names} weather Thanks guys!
Local SEO | | Dakota_G0 -
International Versus Local Backlinks?
I'm running a dentist's website and I've been wondering if there is any additional benefit to achieving local backlinks from other medical sites versus larger international ones? For example, if I had a blog article that I wanted another site to link to, would you choose the local medical website within the same city or the international one that has more viewers?
Local SEO | | Undergrnd0 -
Trying to rank homepage nationally and internal pages locally?
We are a finance brokerage in Australia and we operate in a specialist niche and in regional areas with low competition but we have identified KW's that are very profitable to us but seem to need different approach re strategy. We specialise in Agribusiness lending. We have been pretty scrappy in the past with our SEO as it has always been done by me, and as a startup, as everyone knows, the jack of all trades can help and hinder! To date, we have done a lot of Adwords (and KW research) so I have a fair idea of what keywords I am after. Some KW are low competition and extremely profitable to us. But there is a difference between them on who our competitor is and how difficult it would be to rank and which strategy to use. For example Agribusiness, used by all major banks, now they provide agribusiness, but only via their own products, as we are brokers we tend to receive a lot of new leads as we are brokers and we can compare all products and as agribusiness can be quite complex this is a major point of difference for us. So my strategy to rank for this KW would include a national approach as we provide advice in this space on a national scale, which has worked well via AdWords leads. But would like to move away from my sole reliance on AdWords. Then we move onto KW that we have also had some success on a national scale via Adwords but the metrics suggest is better from a local perspective (local regional town), i.e hobby farm loan, rural finance, even home loans (when there is no other local competitor in small town). As we have brokers in other regional towns this also opens up an opportunity to have either internal pages with lots of local signals (i.e NAP, Authority outbound links, local KW, social signals from local FB groups etc). But can a internal page compete against a competitors HP, for example I was going to set up mysite/Toowoomba.com.au internal page with info re that broker and lots of local points, or am I best to create another site, i.e brandname-Toowoomba.com.au (still linking from my contact us page for Toowoomba) and focus solely on local for this site (including internal pages to rank locally, i.e Toowoomba Home loans)? the extra benefit is I then create another asset if I was to sell the region as a franchise (another discussion) So, my question is, can I mix my strategies without any issues, or should I create separate sites?
Local SEO | | AgLend0 -
Best approach for international multi country SEO
Hi all We're working with a client that is in the travel industry and they already have a relatively new site (setup in September 2014) which is on a .com domain We've completed a digital strategy for them and have identified 12 key markets within Europe, North America, South America and the Asia Pacific region. We have suggested an approach of setting up individual local websites for these countries and for countries in the same region sharing a common language (like USA & Canada) we're thinking to use a subdomain on the existing .com (eg. amaricas.clientdomain.com) Does this sound like a solid approach? thanks
Local SEO | | seobackbone0 -
Video marketing strategy for new sites - Youtube / third party vs self hosted?
Howdy Mozzers, We are a new UK solar comparison site looking to implement video to help buid our site traiffic / leads. We currently make a 1 min video summary of our blog posts using Animoto and embed the video at the top of the blog post on our site. The original thought of introducing video was to help our blog posts rank higher. My question is, which of the following strategy is the best for building traffic and generating leads for our site 1. Hosting video on Youtube and embedding it on our site 2. Hosting video on Animoto and embedding it on our site (not sharing on youtube) 3. Hosting the video on our own domain and not sharing it on Youtube and other third party sites 4. Embedding the video from youtube or animoto on our site and sharing it everywhere (dailymotion, vimeo,etc) Our target audience is UK only for the time being. We would like to build traffic quickly and are focused on the short term. I would be appreciate any replies discussing the different advantages disadvantages of the options and a final personal opinion. Thanks!
Local SEO | | MozBoy0 -
Transfer Local SEO rankings to another domain
The question is specifically about local rankings, not the organic ones. My client recently acquired another Law firm. Acquired firm's website is ranking well in Google local and has a decent SEO authority. Its Google mybusiness page is also established and has a lot of positive reviews. Client's main website is comparatively new and doesn't currently rank well in Google local. The Google mybusiness page is sort of incomplete and doesn't have any review. Both businesses are listed in local directories (client's main business is listed in lot less directories and has fewer citations). The client wants to merge the newly acquired website with his main website, without losing Google local rankings the acquired website has. Or in other words, transfer newly acquired website's local rankings to his main site. Client wants to transfer the website to his main website in all cases while minimizing the damage. I'd transfer acquired website's content to main website, properly map the pages and place 301 redirects. Regarding Google my business pages, what would you suggest? I can either update main business NAP and Website address in Acquired business's mybusiness page, or transfer acquired business's mybusiness ratings to main mybusiness page via this form: https://support.google.com/business/contact/business_move_reviews I've also heard that Google support can merge two business page, however not sure about that. I'd also need to update the business listings and citations. Could you please suggest the best way of doing this? And have you practically tested it?
Local SEO | | Woofire0 -
Local SEO for B&B - Attracting International Customer
Hi Guys, Hope the MOZ expert community will be able to help me 🙂 What would be the best way to manage the SEO for a Bed and Breakfast ? As the B&B is in a touristic place in France attracting lots of German, American and British tourists, the website will be in French, translated in English and German. It will be set up under a .fr extension and using wordpress multisite for each languages, so it will look like this: French: www.mydomain.fr English: en.mydomain.fr German: de.mydomain.fr They'll roughly have the same content for the business part, but they'll have different articles on their respective blogs. Now my questions are: If I sign up to Google my business (http://www.google.com/business/) Would I be able to translate all my business descriptions, separate the reviews per language, use google+ for different language? If not, then should I sign up for the French version of "google my business" and then open 2 separate G+ pages for the English and German version ? Can I open 3 different "google my business" account for each language but with the same google account, same telephone number and same business address ? Should I actually "translate" my business name and create 3 separate website so I can open a "Google my business" for each, but then they'll still have the same address and phone number ? Basically, I want to find the best solution for people around the world to see the content in their own language (reviews, blog post...) and also show up on map listings for google.com /.co.uk / .fr / .de etc... Other social media: Facebook: should I have one page and target the English language for each post in English, etc... Or should I have 3 facebook page in each language ? Should I have 3 pinterest accounts, or should I create 3 boards for each language so I can describe each pictures in proper language Miscellaneous Don't hesitate to give me any other important tips that I should think about before launching ! After being an employee for many years, I want to rock my own business 🙂 Cheers
Local SEO | | LELOnic0