As Jason Springer reports at the Blue Jersey blog, this may not be the only incident of copyright law violation by the Christie campaign. Springer points to a recent ad that features footage with a watermark from Pond5, a company that sells stock video footage. The watermark suggests the Christie campaign used free samples from the company, and did not license the footage, Springer says.
It does appear that the Christie campaign has used stock footage from Pond5 without licensing it, in violation of both our license agreement and copyright law. We have brought this to our legal counsel and will be determining a course of action soon.
Late Update: The video has now been restored on Christie's YouTube page -- apparently in a rush, as it was done with watermarks and all. Bennett told us that at 3:43 p.m. ET, someone associated with the Christie campaign bought permissions for all the relevant videos. "So it looks like they're doing damage control," Bennett said.
I find it hilarious that even though they own the rights now, they still are running the ad with the watermarks. So is this their closing statement on the campaign or copyright infringement?
If Chris Christie is elected governor tomorrow, one of the first things that might hit his desk is a big fat lawsuit for copyright or trademark infringement, essentially the theft of someone's work product. The candidate who has held himself out as the law and order man is already being accused of violating copyrights for ripping off of Monty Python, but take a look at the "closing statement" from the Christie campaign:
You can even see a faint watermark on the screenshot of the video which Youtube pulled automatically. If you watch carefully, you will notice that a majority of the images they used in this ad still have the watermark on it:
What's their closing statement, our candidate was a US Attorney but doesn't understand any parts of the law? Or maybe it's really that they do think there is one set of rules and laws for their candidate, another set for the rest of us.
