Media Law Week 6

Once more without Ian this week, we instead briefly went over two different subjects consisting of Copyright Law and the Freedom Of Information Act.

Firstly, Copyright Law applies to intellectual property which is yours until you sell it to someone else. Until that point, Copyright Law protects your intellectual property from being stolen, copied or otherwise used without your prior consent. When you do sell it, you give away your beneficial rights to it, as it is then no longer your property. However, of course, there is no copyrights on ideas. The best examples to use for copyrights is for Film scripts - when you first come up with an idea for a script, there can be no copyright for it because it is not yet a tangible property. However, once you write the script and start putting it into production, you can officially have it copyrighted as your own intellectual property, and will therefore be protected against any kind of copying or theft of your creative brainchild. This is a very common process, especially in the film industry (hence the example) and can usually mean that your productions are legally secure until you give up such beneficiary rights through selling your product. Also, if you are creating something to be used by someone to to be used on something else, the product then becomes property of the person you have been paid to write it for.

Just because something is put up on the internet does not mean that it is available to everyone. The internet may be a free forum, but that does not give people the right to theft. Nowadays, some pictures or downloads have electronic watermarks programmed into them which can then be traced back to you, so when using other peoples documents from the internet its always helpful to purchase them or get permission for their use if you're using them for official journalistic reasons. So the only totally safe way to do it, is to do it yourself.

In cases of fair dealing, some companies agree with each other that they can use a certain amount of each others materials provided that they don't make it available to other people. As an example, say that one TV company might want to use some clips of another companies football match (say BBC News wanted to use clips from a game that was covered by Sky Sports), Sky Sports might be willing to let the BBC use some of their clips provided that they don't show the entire game, credit tghe clips to Sky Sports and that there was a voice over on the clips as well, so its not the original sound. This is a typical example of fair dealing. Another version of this, but slightly changed, is called creative commons - this is when you might have permission to freely use pictures or a certain amount of material in exchange for credits or links to the company. This is most typically used in Reviews, so for instance in the case of Film Reviews a production company such as Paramount or Universal might allow you to use a clip of their latest release as part of the review as long as you provide links to their sites or credit that it is indeed their company releasing the images. This way, the company gains publication, and you gain a well rounded review!

After this, we then went on to discuss the Freedom of Information Act. The FOI Act is a statute that requires any publicly funded body to publish any information asked for on demand. an example of this comes from journalist Matthew Davis who constantly asked hospitals for a league table of the most sued hospitals, which he eventually got and then sold to The Daily Mail for a considerable amount of money to run as a newspiece. Obviously, this mostly applies to information that is allowed to be made public, and restircts the divulgence of information they can't reveal under national security and/or other secrets. As a journalist, you are able to write to the Council or their FOI officer for information you might want/need for an article you are producing, and they have to, by law, answer your request within 60 days. Of course, dependant on the information you are after, the reply after the 60 days might well be a notice to say that your request is still being processed and that you "will be contacted soon, and thank you for your time", but if it is information you know you can get then you can keep requesting them for it.

Some other places you can go for access to certain information is whatdotheyknow.com and the Sunlight Project, which is a project assisting people in gathering information on known criminals. These are incredibly useful places to go to in a pinch.

More on this in next weeks lecture, and at http://www.winchesterjournalism.com/