Blagged! Nope, sorry that's copyright!

Today's law lecture consisted of going through a few of today's papers and analysing whether people's privacy laws had been breached and whether they had been defamed or not; basically going over what we have done in previous weeks, which is always helpful for me, especially after missing lasts weeks lesson! However, the down-side of today's lesson which I think I can speak for everyone in my class, was that basically all of our images that most of us have retrieved from google images or wherever, and put on our blog ARE copyright, and as budding journalists, we should take off due to copyright constrictions. Bummer, so yeah, if you are now reading my blog and think it looks boring it's because right now I don't have enough time in the day to go out taking pictures of Kim Kardashian, Judges and The Beatles! :)
Copyright, existed in the UK and US in common law since the early 18th Century. Copyright can be related to intellectual property which is a residual right that every citizen has not to have their work stolen and exploited by others. This property right is protected in the same way as any other right.
There are two types of copyright and these are as followed;


1. Keep ownership (Licence) - you pay a little bit of money to own it
OR
2. Sell copyright (Buyout) - you sell the copyright completely, so you therefore own none of it.


 A further example of this is our copyright rights as Journalism/Winchester University students. When we joined, we signed a sheet which stated that any work we produce is property of the University rather than ourselves, therefore when Winol students produce their videos for the news bulletins, that is property of the University. Recently, Cambridge University students interviewed previous Bond man Roger Moore in their university newspaper, ultimately, this interview if sold would mean the students got no profit from it. Sucks a bit, i know!

Another example mentioned by Chris today was how The Beatles sold all their copyright rights to Michael Jacksons record company, therefore if you used a Beatles song on your own website which you profitted money from, Michael's record company could sue for using 'their' property without consent. This can be related to the two different types of consent available;Explicit consent - when someone (say a celebrity) sends out a press release saying they are going to be in a specific place at a specific time for the press to take pictures. Putting it simply, it is the press having TOTAL consent.Implicit consent - When although the press do not have explicit consent, the celebrity is not trying to hide their face from the paps and not making a fuss about not wanting their picture taken.

Another good example of this, is one of my own images (shown above) which is now published on my blog. Ultimately, you should not take my image as it is mine and i have not given you proper consent. So to cheer up your day, this is my pumpkin man created by me and my mum this halloween, his name is Timmy;

Now on to a very important topic of today's lesson; Fair dealing (lifting, in tabloid terms). Fair dealing relates to having no copyright in facts, such as if you use the score from a football match, that can not be classed as copyright. Fair dealing can be related to these three things;
1. Comment
2. Criticism
3. Review
From the 1998 copyright act, you are allowed to use someone else's work aslong as you are either commenting on it, critising it, or reviewing it. In most circumstances, the source must be credited, have commercial availability and package a review with fair dealing.
You can also use fair dealing if you are doing private research and for study purposes, you are critising or news reporting or making copies and lending by librarians.

Following the above notes on fair dealing, this can be closely related to Creative Commons which was and is generally used in the US. It refers to the way in which some people allow others to use their work (whether it be an image/video and so on) under their own certain conditions. This is where the website www.flickr.com comes in handy as it allows you to search for a particular image, and chose to only see ones under certain copyright constrictions, then when finding the image you want, view the certain conditions the producer choses (mostly to be credited for the image).

So, this blog may look plain and simple now due to lack of images and relating to this, lack of time to go out and photograph particular things, however it does include a lot of important information! Now i'm back on top form and getting over this illness, my blogging should be more frequent, if not, i'm sure I have an extremely reasonable excuse!