Lost in Copyright

The time was 12 o'clock. The place the stripe auditorium. The lecturer? Nowhere to be found actually and this put me in a pickle. I had to use all my cunning to wait around for a whole hour(!!) before the lecturer actually turned up, (apparently it had been moved back an hour but us Journalists didn't get that memo). Once we actually got the lecture going it was actually quite interesting. Because we shared the lecture with Media Production students it did not of course have the same Journalistic focus as our Tuesday Law lectures but it was useful all the same.

The main point of the lecture really was to show us all how important copyright really is. As Journalists you may not think it directly applies to you but copyright covers virtually everything and that means everything you publish so it matters a lot. We were given the example of a CD; on it the album artwork is copyrighted, the band logo is copyrighted, so is the record label logo, the music is copyrighted as well as every song being individually copyrighted. We were given many other examples, (in fact examples of copyright made up the majority of the lecture, probably because it was tailored towards the media production students). Strictly Come Dancing was another example of something that has more copyrighted material than you would necessarily expect. Of course there is the obvious that the music used is copyrighted but you also have the steps in the choreography, the costume design, the sets, layout and even lighting are all copyrighted to the show. An example tailored towards the Journalists was that of filming a busker in a street shot for a news report. If you do this you would need a signature from the busker and then would have to clear the copyright on the music they were playing. The only defence you have to not doing this is the incidental inclusion of the busker and the music. This can only work if you didn't intend to film the busker and it was just something going on in the background. This is actuality.

The owners of copyright can prevent people performing it or using it i.e. The Beatles music is still heavily copyrighted, an alteration can also be prevented and the media production lecturer gave us an example from when he used to make documentaries where he had altered a song for use in the show and only found out shortly before airing that they had not secured copyright for the song. A few hours and a few hasty phone calls and a message passed on by the Swiss police force later they had the copyright but it is worth checking and double checking that you have the copyright on almost everything. The lecture ended with us watching two film clips, one from a Verdi opera and the other a Mel Gibson movie, Conspiracy Theory. We were then asked what were the copyright issues within the clips and how had some of them been resolved by crediting. In the opera the music played whilst credits rolled over telling us the composer, the librettist and the Orchestra. Credit people and copyright wont be a problem, or at least that's how it seemed. Really though copyright is a necessary evil as it enables us to go ahead in our work whilst still staying within the boundaries of the law.

Sorry that this was quite a short blog post but it wasn't a particularly content heavy lecture. Maybe I should just read the Copyright chapter in McNae's?