P3 Legal or ethical issues identified and resolved

Copyright

Meaning and Purpose

Copyright is defined as “the exclusive and assignable legal right, given to the originator for a fixed number of years, to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material.” This being taken from Google's Definition.

Copyright law’s main rule is that you can not use any copyrighted material without permission or without a form of royalty payment. Companies and individual can copywritten lyrics of songs, video or audio footage or written works to protect their creations and stop them being used without fair credit or payments. The structure of copyright law is the very reason that the film, music and creative industry in general can make money and sustain itself due to them then having the right to sell their creations and works without illegal usage or viewings (this is becoming much more difficult to control as the online usage of illegal video and music streaming is increasing vastly each year).

Intellectual Property Rights

Meaning and Purpose

Intellectual property rights in the UK are automatic when referring to commercial projects, for instance if someone were selling song lyrics as their own when they were in fact written or sung by someone else. The automatic copyright laws of the UK would dictate that the song lyrics were invalid due to intellectual property theft.

Filming Permissions (Contracts for talent and property release)

Signed copy

Royalties

Royalties are payments made after a project such as a film or photographic work that are paid to individuals whose work was used in the project without any form of written permission, it is important for film and photo shoots that all actors have given permission for their face to be used in the project as well as any music or images that were taken from other's work. As I did not take any graphics I will need to pay royalties although in photographic work royalties can sometimes be claimed by people for use of location without permission as well as franchises and brands whose icons appear in the frame accidently. I avoided any known brands in the shoot and as I shot at my own home this meant I didn't have to pay royalties for use of location.

Violence

As my film has elements of suggested harm to the main character of Michael, when he was burnt by the kettle towards the end of the film, it is important that the violence be avoided as I did not want to risk having to heighten my film's age rating, as it stand with the mere suggestion of violence at a PG level. As showing a burn would boost this to a 15 rating. I was careful to avoid any injuries or violence in my accompanied print based media as well to match this. I decided to go for a more dark and brooding feel that suggest there was any violence in the film, in keeping with the expectation a PG rating gives the film.

Public Interest

As the shoot and filming was on private residence in an unpopular area it was easy to avoid people, as I had placed signs towards the front of the private house to indicate to actors that we were shooting there it was obvious to see that it had drawn some attention from passing members of the public, however there were no incidents of public interest in the project and in the timeframe we had no delays due to this kind of interruption.