Professional Documents
Culture Documents
COPYRIGHT LAW
Copyright is having the legal right to print, publish, perform, film, or record
literary, artistic, or musical material. This means no one else is allowed to use it
and call it their own work, this is a legal matter.
Copyright is important as it protects peoples work from being stolen. Not only
this, but you can gain income from allowing others to use your work, if they use
it without your permission then you have the right to sue them for it. The fact
you people can buy the rights to use it means you as the producer of the work
have full control as to who uses it and for what. There are two main purposes of
copyright laws, one of them being to protect the producer/publisher and to keep
their work safe. The other reason would be to promote the progress of peoples
work.
The copyright law protects a variety of different materials: literary works; musical
works; dramatic works; pantomimes and choreographic works; pictorial, graphic
and sculptural works; motion pictures and other audio-visual works; sound
recordings; architectural work. Copyright laws cover pretty much everything
except the names of groups / businesses / products / services etc.
Breaching copyright laws is a serious offence. There are different consequences
depending on what the producer / publisher wants to do. You may get a letter
from the publisher explaining that it is illegal for them to use the work without
permission and in that letter you will be asked to remove the work. Another
consequence is a demand sent to you explaining you must cease and desist the
work, or your internet server will automatically take care of this. One of the
worse consequences of infringing copyright laws would be that you could face
fines of up to 50000. Jail time is also possible, depending on the extent of
infringement.
Copyright infringement despite the efforts to stop it from happening, it still does.
MTV owner, Viacom, recently sued YouTube $1billion (520 million) for massive
intentional copyright infringement. The reason for this is YouTube showed some
of MTVs videos that had been taken from the TV. Viacom states that 160,000
individual YouTube clips breach copyright laws. The videos consist of recordings
from the television taken by members of the public then uploaded to the video
sharing site. The fact YouTube allowed these recordings to go on the site is a
huge infringement of copyright laws.
within the TV & film industry, the BBFC equal opportunities page would be a
good example of this as they are promoting the fact they want a variety of
people to help them out. Another example would be this BFI promotion for
diversity. http://www.bfi.org.uk/about-bfi/policy-strategy/diversity, they state that
at the moment only 0.3% of the film workforce are disabled and that needs to
change. They commit themselves to diversity and want to change that statistic.
Film has the potential to be the most representative and diverse form of our age
to reflect changing attitudes, people, landscape but we are not there yet!
There are many ethical issues to be considered within the media sector: social
issues and sensitivities representation of gender, representation of religious
beliefs; linguistic usages; accessibility. It is important to put all of these in
perspective to avoid complaints, resulting in removing the TV show or film from
air. IF guidelines are breached then Ofcom have the right to remove the show.
REPRESENTATION OF GENDER
Throughout TV & film we are used to women being represented differently to
men. For years now there have been issues due to this. The female characters
tend to only serve the male needs. For example being portrayed as housewives.
An example of this would be this Persil washing powder advert aired on the
television in 1959, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D93fK9vBnMg, from this
advert we can see they have used only female actors. This suggests that
washing up as a womans job. Throughout the commercial the narrator was
saying how the new formula allows your hands to be extra smooth and soft. This
relates to the interests of women as soft skin (body image) is key to women, also
men but women in particular. This happened a lot more in older times than now
as now we are focusing more on equal opportunities, however unfortunately we
do still come across this. A more recent example would be this article about the
representation of women, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/13/women-inthe-media-female_n_2121979.html, it states that throughout television 44.3% of
female character were employed, where as 54.5% of male characters were
employed. This again represents women to be housewives and not fit for full jobs
which is a representation from years ago which we are now trying to rectify.
OnePoll asked 1000 women aged 16-30 their thoughts on the representation of
women in TV & film, over half said that women were not shown fairly and in an
accurate way. The survey discovered that a lot of this happened to be genre
specific, for example 42% said women were portrayed the worst in films in the
horror genre. Body image is a main factor when it comes to the issues of gender
representation. With the increasing pressure to look a certain way, 68% of the
female candidates said they rarely see women promoting a realistic body image.
Men are supposed to be represented in a masculine way; this involves having
strength, power, sexual attractiveness, physique and independence. However, it
is said that men are not portrayed in a realistic way or in this masculine way,
they seem to be portrayed as the jokers/fools. For example in beer adverts; the
typical conventions of those would be a slouched man who finds comfort in his
beer. He tends to rely on the beer to make him happy. TV shows such as Family
Guy & The Simpsons have depicted the man as lazy and stupid. Both male
protagonists in these shows are lazy and stupid who depend on their wives.
However the women are still shown to rely on the men. Another example of this
would be the TV comedy Everybody Loves Raymond. Raymond being the male
protagonist in the show he is portrayed as a goof and is the cause of the joke in
most occasions.