Copyright and Ethical Issues in my Motion Graphics Project
What is Copyright?
Copyright
is a law that states that any work or idea that has been created belongs to the
rightful owner and creator. Any profits or credit from the produce goes to the rightful
owner of it and the work cannot be copied, changed or remade without the
rightful owner’s consent or they could risk getting sued. This law is immoral
in some people’s viewpoints. These people believe that work should be free and
it is unfair to keep people from working together and promoting creativity and
inspiration through others’ work. This common view created the Creative Commons
association which I shall discuss further on in this essay. Associated with the
copyright laws are the three moral rights that further protect ownership of
work.
The three
moral rights include:
The right
of attribution – the creator of the work has the right to be identified as
such. This means that any work you create can have your name or alias placed
upon it or tagged with it so people know who owns and has created this work.
The right
of integrity – the work may not be altered or changed without consent. An
example of this could be when a musician decided to adapt an album created and
produced by the band The White Stripes. The musician put a bass track over all
the songs and then re-released it under a new title but still featuring the
band’s name. There was a lot of controversy of this issue as to whether or not
the musician had permission to do this. But luckily, the musician happened to
meet Jack White, a member of The White Stripes, and Jack said that it was okay
for the musician to do what he did. This is a rare case. Not all people are
lucky enough to meet the people who produced work they would like to adapt, or
lucky enough to contact them to make sure that what they are doing is legal and
right.
Lastly, False
attribution – the work cannot be attributed to a creator falsely. This means
that the real creator must be stated. Anyone who steals work from another creator
or author cannot, by law, attach their name to the work in-question.
Copyright
is heavily included in any industry, especially the media industry. Because it
is such a creative industry, everything made and born into it is protected by
copyright. This means that when working in this industry in the future, I
cannot copy existing work or use or change it in any way (for example, a game
idea, music, designs etc.) unless the work is under Creative Commons.
Creative
Commons are an association based in California that oppose the copyright law so
they created their own laws that state when creators and people want their work
to be shared and used in any way. The creative commons licences that you can
use include, Attribution – this allows other people to use, change, tweak and
adapt your work as long as they give you original credit. Another licence is Attribution-NoDerivs, this license
allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is
passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
For my motion graphics project, I must not use or copy any work already produced if I am to publish it or release it publicly. If I use any work that has already been released in my project I must credit it at some point in the feature otherwise I could risk getting sued. Any music I use must also be credited.
Ethics
In my project, ethics is an important feature. Equality in gender and ethnic background is imperative. In our group we had two girls which is a rare thing in the media industry but it is becoming more frequent. Media has a large effect on what people think and feel so representation is important. If you publicize offensive views or explicit content, you will receive a lot of negative stigma. That is why, for our project, we will not mistreat people of other genders and ethnicity. Everyone is equal.
