El documentalista en el entorno actual de los medios de comunicación audiovisuales como gestor de imágenes

摘要

Nowadays, audio-visual market in Spain is undergoing a significant process of transformation that will be enhanced by the imminent complete analogue-to-digital switchover and its consequences. The evolution of the audio-visual market is leading to the outsourcing of audio-visual productions of the existing TV channels, therefore, audio-visual production companies are becoming their suppliers of contents, although they usually have reduced teams at their disposal, and not a wide structure such as the one existing at TV channels. Since the documentalist cannot count either on a stock footage archive or on licence agreements with audio-visual news agencies and other stock footage archives, his functions in these audio-visual productions demand the development and the hybridisation of tasks and skills. This is how the documentalist is becoming an image manager, as he not only analyses and obtains images from the existing stock footage industry, but he also deals with the rights identification and management copyright research and ongoing rights management models of copyright-related rights from different image providers all over the world. The reflection is focused as well on the concept of royalties and on the implications that nowadays development of new technologies in information and society have on it. The complexity of the rights indentification and management copyright research and ongoing rights is leading to new legal challenges, which impact on media professional’s tasks and their overall role in audio-visual media organizations is also brought to examination.