There were no winners when hundreds of thousands of tons of mud and rock cascaded down a La Conchita hillside on Jan. 10, pulverizing houses and killing 10.

Even Carl Stein, the KCAL (Channel 9) camera operator whose exclusive images of the rushing hillside were seen around the world, came away with little to show for his compelling footage.

“I knew it was running into houses,” he said. “I could hear people screaming. I knew watching it that people would get killed. People were crying and screaming that there were kids in there. Afterward, I was accosted by locals they didn’t want me being there.”

While prized footage of major news events are commodities in the ultra-competitive news world, such exclusive shots are rarely a source of big paydays for the photographers who shoot them or the stations that own the copyrights.

Footage shot by camera operators from local stations is owned by the stations, which typically have content-sharing agreements with other media companies that bring them nominal compensation for exclusive images.

In the case of Viacom Inc.-owned KCAL, its relationship with CNN allows the Time Warner Inc. subsidiary to run the footage all over the world with no further compensation. It also means that other than its sister station, KCBS (Channel 2), no other local newscasts could air the mudslide tape.

ABC, Fox and CBS affiliates are also part of the CNN consortium and have set up their own content-sharing group, Network News Service.

Only General Electric Co.’s NBC, which operates the MSNBC cable news channel, operates outside of both content-sharing deals.

“The only way I could run it is if I called KCAL and got permission and said we’d give them call letters and credits, which I wouldn’t do for professional and competitive reasons,” said Jeff Wald, news director at Tribune Co.-owned KTLA (Channel 5). “There’s so many stories going on in L.A. that cameras catch. One week it might be them, next week it will be us.”

That doesn’t mean the footage wasn’t seen locally on other stations. While KABC couldn’t rebroadcast the landslide footage feed from CNN, the network’s news shows beamed the images unhindered to L.A.

“NNS provides a conduit for breaking news video, like a feed, but it has very specific rules,” said Cheryl Fair, news director at KABC (Channel 7). “That video was available to ABC national news, so it aired on ‘Good Morning America’ and ‘World News Tonight with Peter Jennings,’ so the (local) embargo didn’t count.”

While L.A. news directors say they generally cooperate with each other in terms of sharing video, they are also highly competitive. Rarely will a station rebroadcast another’s material without permission.

“There’s a very fine line between being cooperative and being non-competitive,” Fair said. “We’re all extremely competitive and we won’t give up our competitive advantage. But if there’s a major news event where we need ongoing coverage, if it impacts public safety, the most important thing is to get the news out. So we will often share helicopter shots because they can only stay in the air for so long.”

When the line is crossed, the parties usually end up in court.

Bob Long, senior vice president and news director at KNBC (Channel 4), said stealing images broadcast around the globe really can’t be halted, meaning that the only way to punish violators is to sue for damages.

“I’ve been the victim of this sort of thing a number of times, and your redress is in the courts,” Long said. “I consider it grand larceny. You can only go after them later, if you have resources and if you even know about it.”

That’s something Vince Cox, a partner at Leopold Petrich & Smith LLP in Los Angeles, feels is a defect in copyright law.

Cox represented KTLA in its suit against KNBC for broadcasting footage of the 1991 Rodney King beating without permission. KTLA had purchased the rights in perpetuity for $500 from George Holliday, who lived nearby and caught the incident on video.

“Whenever judges don’t want to make a hard decision, they use a balancing test,” Cox said. “The extent of the use, the degree to which it impairs the economic value of the work for the rights holder, the purpose of the work that makes it very hard to predict what the outcome will be.”

While news stations frequently share material with affiliates in other parts of the country, it’s rare for them to license it to other news organizations for money. While news operations regularly buy footage from stringers, the independent camera operators who make a living driving around town all day listening to police scanners looking for something to film, their compensation is pretty low.