When it comes time for post-production, you will need to be able to send a huge list of deliverables to your distributor. The deliverables associated with intellectual property rights will be just one part of that list.
(A couple of good articles by filmmakers documenting their trials with deliverables and tips for getting a handle on them early are director Barri Chase’s article “The Big “D” of Distribution: Deliverables” and director Marcus Mizelle’s article “How to Deliver Your Film with Tips and Tricks that Actually Work”.)
One of the big items that you need is your chain of title. This is all of the information that shows that you own your film, and that you have gained rights or licenses to every piece of intellectual property in your film. If you don’t have a clean chain of title, you’re not going to be able to get Errors and Omissions insurance (another required deliverable). And if you can’t acquire E&O insurance, you will be hard pressed to find a distributor that will take a chance on your film. This is because the distributor can be held liable for any intellectual property infringements by the filmmakers even if they didn’t do anything wrong.
Even if you are claiming fair use on some of the material in your film, you will have to know why (and document why) your fair use is defensible. Filmmakers will only be able to claim fair use in a very narrow range of circumstances, typically for purposes of commentary, criticism, or parody.
So the chain of title would include getting the rights to use any outside material such as a novel or a pre-recorded piece of music. The rights may be given by, say, an author of a novel to make one movie or many movies. The author may reserve some other rights, such as live television or dramatic rights. So the rights allocation could be complicated. See Attorney Mark Litwak’s article “Attention, Filmmakers: Here’s What You Need to Know About Chain of Title (and Why You Need It)” for more advice.
Also, the chain of title includes the work of any of the people doing creative work on the film set. Employment contracts need to be drawn up with “work for hire” language so that the copyright for their work is assigned to the film production company. This includes the writer, director, producer, actors, cinematographer, and pretty much anyone else on the film crew. For a fairly extensive list of the items needed for the chain of title, please see the article “Successful Filmmakers Know How To Deliver Clean Chain Of Title” from attorney Donovan Rodriques.
Precisely documenting your chain of title can be an intricate undertaking. A large part of the purpose of this site is to give you a taste of the issues involved in this task. There are multiple books and trainings that will provide you with sets of premade contracts and forms to help you navigate this process. I won’t pretend to know which one to recommend to you, but you can find a list in the Contracts and Clearance section of this page (Books / Trainings).
You will also want to hire an attorney to clear your script. In essence, this means to have someone go over your script to call attention to any issues with regards to copyright, trademark, right of publicity, or locations. It might also be possible to have an issue with phone numbers or with names that might be confused with living people’s names. It may be fine to use trademarks in a nominal and non-defamatory way. But entertainment attorney Nicole Papincak notes that if you have the luxury of hiring an art department, they can help you create your own art for fake logos or brand packaging if you want to be super-safe. She says that this can help you to avoid blurring brands or reshooting later on if there is an issue with the trademark use. (See the article “Lights, Camera, Legal: The 4 ‘C’s’ to Consider Before Filming”).
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