Firstly, I feel that I should explain that as part of my Journalism course at the University of Winchester, we are required to take two modules in media law. The first, in our first year of university, to give us a grasp of what not to do as beginner journalists. The second module starts in our third (and current) year, and is designed to bring us up to speed on any recent changes in the law, or any cases relevant to our interests. Most noticeably at the moment is the Leveson inquiry, which will almost certainly have a major impact on our working careers.
To bring you up to speed, last week we had a lecture on copyright by Peter Hodges essentially a dos and don'ts for journalists. Mr Hodges gave a similar lecture during my first year which I wrote about here, so I wont go into too much detail on the basics on this post. Instead I'm going to talk about fair dealing which is a very important thing to get around, and very useful if you know how to use it.
Fair dealing as described by McNae's essential law for journalists can be used 'for the purpose of reporting current events. essentially meaning that it is OK to use a small amount of copyrighted material if a news story needs it to help explain something. It should always bring something to the story, however, and does not count as fair dealing if it is simple there to bulk out a piece. Fair dealing can always be used for the purposes of criticism and review. This means that if you were reviewing a movie, a video game, or a piece of music; you are allowed to use a small amount of the copyrighted material. How much you are allowed to use isn't clear in the law, and it's easy to be put off by uncertainty, but this was something I expressed to Mr Hodges, who, as the former head of BBC Copyright should have a very good idea on what is acceptable.
He said that for the purposes of criticism and review, you can use an aggregate of two minutes for each subject. the clips can be long or short, but no more than two minutes.
Below is a short review show written and edited by yours truly. We showed this to Peter Hodges and he said it was absolutely safe in terms of fair dealing. It had no more than two minutes of footage for each game, and the details of the copyright holders are clearly displayed throughout. Essentially, this is what you have to do to be able to use copyrighted footage:
You'll have to excuse the dodgy puns and crappy audio mixing. It was my first attempt at something like this and if it makes you fell better, I cringe everytime I watch it. Think of it this way: visually and aurally, this is a bit of a train wreck; But as far as the letter of the law goes, this is excellent.
Some other quick points that were covered in the lecture: When filming live events, you are not at fault if copyrighted music is audible as this is accidental inclusion; if however you then recorded the copyrighted material in a package, you could be in trouble. this can prove tricky when filming live events such as sports games and will definitely have to be thought about when editing.
Also, everything said about fair dealing above, does not ring true for photographs. You must always have the copyright holder's permission to use any photo. for example, do you see any pictures in this blog post?
No, you don't.
No comments:
Post a Comment