Courtesy& property of Bizarrocomic.blogspot.com
A sticky point for us media students is copyright – what it is and how it affects us.
The basic rule is this:
It is an offence to perform any of the following acts without the consent of the copyright owner:
i. Copy the work.
ii. Rent, lend or issue copies of the work to the public.
iii. Perform, broadcast or show the work in public.
iv. Adapt the work.
The author of a work, or a director of a copyright film may also have certain moral rights:
v. The right to be identified as the author.
vi. Right to object to derogatory treatment
So this means you as the author of an original piece of creative media text (like a song, moving image or game) have the right to not have your work copied without permission, and you have the right to be identified as having created it.
a really nice website that explains a lot of this clearly, though it is a US college , is this:
https://copyright.columbia.edu/basics/copyright-quick-guide.html
It’s worth checking out as its explained in straightforward language.
The UK copyright guidelines site is a bit more stale, but all relevent:
https://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p01_uk_copyright_law
it contains useful downloadable documents – which it has given me permission to share with you freely, so here’s one – click to download
It’s worth noting though that although the copyright law starts simply enough, it actually gets more and more twisty and confusing as arguments between copyright owners break out, and everybody stars setting lawyers on each other…
This news story highlights the issue of distributing copyrighted media, in this case songs, without the permission of the copyright owner (the studios)
Excerpt:
A federal jury on Friday ordered a Boston University graduate student who admitted illegally downloading and sharing music online to pay $675,000 to four record labels.
Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, admitted in court that he downloaded and distributed 30 songs. The only issue for the jury to decide was how much in damages to award the record labels.
Under federal law, the recording companies were entitled to $750 to $30,000 per infringement. But the law allows as much as $150,000 per track if the jury finds the infringements were willful. The maximum jurors could have awarded in Tenenbaum’s case was $4.5 million.
Jurors ordered Tenenbaum to pay $22,500 for each incident of copyright infringement, effectively finding that his actions were willful. The attorney for the 25-year-old student had asked the jury earlier Friday to “send a message” to the music industry by awarding only minimal damages.
From ABC News site
It’s worth noting some countries do not enforce copyright restrictions as strictly as the USA or Europe – as we can see above.
Copyright infringement can be found across all media sectors – but is often hard to distinguish legally – in this example the gameplay seems obviously copied – but are the monster sprites?
And what are your thoughts on this film? should Michael Bay be unhappy….?
Categories: Uncategorized
Visual Arts 