Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video on the ins and outs of how narrative films and television reproduce known trademarks.
The law—like a snowstorm in spring or Bohemian Rhapsody winning an Oscar for best film editing —can be difficult to understand. Legalese is a verbal maze. Each footnote has its own footnote. And on the whole, for us lay-folk: needling through legal texts can feel alienating, dense, and almost intentionally overcomplicated.
A pity! As many an inquiring mind has surely had their curiosity quashed once they opened up the arcane behemoth known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Or their eager search cut-short by PDFs that have yet to be OCR‘d for term searching.
Thank god, then, for those heroes who can not only suffer through dense legal scriptures but interpret them for us. In snappy twenty-minute video essays, no less!
The explainer video below concisely unpacks something I’ve always wanted to know, namely: how do films and television shows (legally!) depict known trademarks? When is it ok to have a can of Coke in-frame? Can characters wear sweaters emblazoned with the GAP logo?
Is it all product placement? Or is there room for parody and satire? And, most importantly: where do fair use end and the rights of a company begin?
Watch “When Can You Use a Trademark Logo in Your Film? – IQBiTS“: