My family has been victimized and violated by the Netherlands' broadcasting group Netwerk TV.
Parts from my adoption videos were downloaded by this network for a documentary on Chinese children being abducted and sold to orphanages for adoption and government officials forcibly taking children from families who had children against their population control laws and placing those children in orphanages where they are (supposedly) adopted internationally. In the middle of this report, they had placed a shot of my husband holding our daughter just after she had been handed to us, and a full-faced shot of our daughter sitting on a playroom floor.
This gives anyone who doesn't speak Dutch the impression that our daughter is one of those abducted and sold to an orphange so she could be adopted internationally. This company did not ask permission to use our video, because they are under the assumption that if it is on Youtube, it is fair game for ANYTHING! And I have not been successful in getting a transcript of the documentary - Netwerk TV won't respond to that request.
I've had no problems with someone embedding our video into a blog or website - as long as the video is left intact and not used for purposes other than what I had intended it for. But to take video from someone and then use it in what is supposed to be a documentary without the permission of the owner of the video, and to put it into the video as part of that documentary - it implies that our adoption has a dark, clandestine, illegal and immoral side to it.
OK, let's deal with the truth. There are going to be VERY FEW adoptive parents of Chinese children who will know the exact circumstances of their child's birth and abandonment. VERY FEW. We don't know anything other than what was in our daughter's write up in her referral. We trusted that referral info...
But unless the people making the documentary could absolutely prove that our daughter was one of those children involved with this issue... and if that is the case they absolutely should be telling us our daughter may not have been abandoned as originally believed - that would be the moral and ethical thing to do (but of course the words moral, ethical, and Netherlands doesn't seem to go together when you think of the government sanctioned prostitution and drug trade in the Netherlands) - but since they can't prove this (and I am assuming this is the case because no one has contacted us to this effect) they they had no right to use our video so as to leave one implicated in this scenario.
They have refused to provide me with a transcript of the video... and although they claim to have done nothing wrong, they have taken down the video from their site and are supposed to edit out our video from their documentary. Well.... if they have done nothing wrong, why are they backing down on this?
Parts from my adoption videos were downloaded by this network for a documentary on Chinese children being abducted and sold to orphanages for adoption and government officials forcibly taking children from families who had children against their population control laws and placing those children in orphanages where they are (supposedly) adopted internationally. In the middle of this report, they had placed a shot of my husband holding our daughter just after she had been handed to us, and a full-faced shot of our daughter sitting on a playroom floor.
This gives anyone who doesn't speak Dutch the impression that our daughter is one of those abducted and sold to an orphange so she could be adopted internationally. This company did not ask permission to use our video, because they are under the assumption that if it is on Youtube, it is fair game for ANYTHING! And I have not been successful in getting a transcript of the documentary - Netwerk TV won't respond to that request.
I've had no problems with someone embedding our video into a blog or website - as long as the video is left intact and not used for purposes other than what I had intended it for. But to take video from someone and then use it in what is supposed to be a documentary without the permission of the owner of the video, and to put it into the video as part of that documentary - it implies that our adoption has a dark, clandestine, illegal and immoral side to it.
OK, let's deal with the truth. There are going to be VERY FEW adoptive parents of Chinese children who will know the exact circumstances of their child's birth and abandonment. VERY FEW. We don't know anything other than what was in our daughter's write up in her referral. We trusted that referral info...
But unless the people making the documentary could absolutely prove that our daughter was one of those children involved with this issue... and if that is the case they absolutely should be telling us our daughter may not have been abandoned as originally believed - that would be the moral and ethical thing to do (but of course the words moral, ethical, and Netherlands doesn't seem to go together when you think of the government sanctioned prostitution and drug trade in the Netherlands) - but since they can't prove this (and I am assuming this is the case because no one has contacted us to this effect) they they had no right to use our video so as to leave one implicated in this scenario.
They have refused to provide me with a transcript of the video... and although they claim to have done nothing wrong, they have taken down the video from their site and are supposed to edit out our video from their documentary. Well.... if they have done nothing wrong, why are they backing down on this?
3 comments:
Julie,
I am very sorry and upset to hear that.
You don't need any of that while waiting for a referral. Heck you just don't need that period!
I have enjoyed your videos and am sorry you had to take that one away. It was really very nice.
OH no! That's horrible! I can't believe this happened to you...what is this world coming to??? Good luck on your next adoption!
All - I am currently looking into it with an attorney. Not sure what the Netherlands' laws are regarding use of copyrighted material, but I can't imagine it to be all that different from the U.S.
Either way - anyone downloading a video from Youtube and then using parts of it for their own purposes is at least unethical, if not illegal. It makes me sick to think that my ancestry is partly from the Netherlands... Phtooey!
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