By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 12
A film given away free is still a rights decision. Ownership, not the upload, is what lasts.
A film posted free to YouTube during a lockdown looks like plain generosity. Underneath the goodwill sits a rights question: who owns the work, who cleared the music and the performances inside it, and whether putting it online strengthens the asset or quietly weakens it.
The lockdown-cinema initiative asked filmmakers to post links to their own films on YouTube, Facebook or Vimeo. That form of self-distribution keeps each work in its maker’s hands, but it only builds lasting value if the rights bundled inside the film are owned and cleared rather than merely uploaded and hoped over.
Self-distribution keeps control with the maker
Posting directly to a public platform means a Namibian filmmaker keeps the master file and the direct line to the viewer, rather than handing rights to a broadcaster in exchange for a slot. In an industry where distribution has long been the scarce thing, that retained control is itself an asset worth naming.
Control, though, is not the same as protection. A film a maker can post anywhere is also a film a stranger can copy and repost anywhere, and the platform’s convenience does nothing on its own to establish who legally owns what.
Self-distribution hands the filmmaker control of the work; it does not hand them proof of ownership.
A free public upload exposes every clearance
Putting a film in front of an open audience surfaces any right that was never properly cleared. The music on the soundtrack, the performances of the cast and any archive footage all carry their own permissions, and a public upload is the moment a missing clearance becomes visible and actionable rather than buried on a hard drive.
This is the unglamorous discipline that separates a shareable film from a liability. Every title added to the hub either arrives clean or brings a future dispute with it, and the free, open nature of the exercise raises the stakes on getting that right.
Sunlight is the test of a clearance; a free upload is the brightest light a film can face.
Registration is the durable protection
Namibia does have the machinery to lock this value down. The Business and Intellectual Property Authority registers copyright in films and other audio-visual works, and a certificate of registration serves as prima facie evidence of the copyright in any dispute. For a maker giving a film away free, that registration is what lets them still unambiguously own it afterwards.
The point of registering before posting is sequence. Establishing ownership first, then distributing, means the generosity of a free screening never becomes an argument about who the work belonged to in the first place.
Give the film away by all means – but register who it belongs to before you do.
The catalogue as an owned library
Read across all the titles, the initiative is the rough beginning of a national film catalogue in one place. Whether that catalogue is worth anything later depends entirely on whether its contents are owned and cleared, because only rights-secure works can be licensed, sold or bundled once the lockdown moment has passed.
The risk is a well-loved archive that no one can commercially exploit, its films watched by thousands but tangled in unregistered rights. A library is only an asset if someone holds clean title to the books.
An uncleared archive is a memory, not a library; ownership is what turns films into inventory.
For a filmmaker, a producer or a rights adviser, the lockdown-cinema initiative is a lesson in where the lasting value of Namibian film actually sits: not in the upload but in the owned, registered and cleared work behind it. The decision it forces is whether to do the rights work up front, so that a generous free screening leaves the maker with an asset they still own, rather than a popular film they can no longer fully control.
Sources: The Namibian; Copyright – BIPA; BIPA blazing the trail for copyright protection (Adams & Adams)
