CINCINNATI — Viral videos are being shared across social media of a violent fight in downtown Cincinnati over the weekend involving a large group of people.
Many of you have asked why we haven't shared the whole video.
While we are using a small portion of the video, the reason we haven't shown the whole video is because we have not been able to get permission to use the entire video. WCPO 9 and our parent company Scripps follow U.S. copyright laws, which require permission for the use of any video or photo to come from the original photographer or videographer of a photo or a video. We have reached out to several people we believe to be the original videographers of these videos, but have not yet received permission to use the video from those people. In fact, we have been told by one of the people with rights to one of the videos that we are not allowed to post it.
After several prominent elected leaders reacted to these videos, we decided to show a small portion of it in our broadcasts and online video storytelling to acknowledge what is being referred to in the realm of fair use, but because we do not have permission to show the entire thing, that video is not on any of WCPO's platforms.
This is why we have written and reported what we've seen in the video.
The reason you may see the video in full from others on your social media feed is that platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok allow aggregation for those who are not profiting from sharing the video to their feed. As a business and public media entity, we are beholden to a higher standard of copyright law before we are able to share the video. If you are seeing the video on other websites or media social pages, it's because they either were able to secure permission that we have not, or they are potentially in violation of copyright law.
We first got a tip about the video early Saturday morning and we reached out to several people we believe were the original photographers.
As of late Saturday evening, we were able to embed the video in an online article, something that is permitted by copyright laws. But later Saturday, sharing and embedding settings were revoked by the people who posted those videos, and thus, we were no longer able to show the videos.
You can watch those videos on their original pages here and here.
We have seen some social media comments made that because the videos are taken in a public place on the street or sidewalk, they are in the public domain and thus, we should be able to show the video. This is not true, according to U.S. copyright laws. Copyright covers any original work as soon as it is produced in a tangible medium (which in this case is the post to Facebook), even if a copyright protection has not yet been filed. Here's a brief explainer about how the public domain works.
If you have any video, photos or a witness account you'd like to share of this incident, please reach out to us at newsdesk@wcpo.com, or in our social media DMs.
We have also asked Cincinnati police and the City of Cincinnati for any surveillance footage from this incident, but we have yet to receive any.
We have been aggressive in trying to report the details of what happened in this video despite the limitations of showing the video, per these U.S. copyright laws.
We as journalists seek to vet and verify information and context before posting about it, while also following relevant U.S. laws as a business and public media entity. This is why you may see things pop up on social media pages before they show up in our feeds, on our website, or on our air: We hold a higher standard of confirming information, and ultimately seek to balance all sides of a story as best we can before reporting.
PJ O'Keefe is the Senior Manager of Digital at WCPO 9.
