The lecture started in unusual fashion with two older students coming into the room to show us an example of investigative journalism which, for reasons of confidentiality, I am not entirely sure I can talk of in full detail. Suffice to say, some investigative journalism had gone on with the result being that some defamatory material could be published which would essentially destroy the person involved.This brought into question some moral issues that had not been fully explored before. Sometimes as a journalist, the difficult decision has to be made about whether it is worth having such a story on your conscience, knowing that you have destroyed someone and their career.
The copyright law for journalists is quite complicated and I have already made a blog post on copyright in general from when Peter Hodges - former head of copyright at the BBC - came to give us a guest lecture on the subject. This lecture however gave more focus on the journalistic aspects and a few examples for us to think on. Increasingly, it is not only property (work) that can be copyrighted but your intellectual property is often just as important. There is no copyright on ideas though; if you were to say 'let's make a film about cowboys', then Clint Eastwood wouldn't be able to do much about it. You are not actually allowed to take things off of the Internet, (pictures included) because they are all protected under copyright. The 1911 Copyright Act make any breach of copyright a crime so it's a more serious thing than you may necessarily think. Often journalism students seem to think they are exempt from these laws purely because they are students. Just because you may feel you have exemption through your inexperience doesn't mean that putting copyrighted material into your blog may come back on you in a bad way.
Any work that you do is copyright and belongs to you until you sell it. The example we had in the lecture was that of shed building. If you build a shed it is yours and no one else's but if you sell it (your wages) it's not yours anymore. In the same way McNae's suggests that because you are being paid wages for your pieces then you no longer own them, (unless you have some prior agreement with the editor). If you were a freelance journalist you could license your work instead of receiving wages; you can have either a one off license or even a royalty. Royalties are more complicated however as they are tied to an advance. To use the example of a book you might be expected to sell say 500,000 copies of the book at £10 so your royalty is 10% of the profits and you receive 500,000 pounds. If your book actually sells 1 million copies then your 10% doesn't change, you just receive more royalties so to use the same example you would receive 1 million pounds from the sale of your book. It is important to secure your license so you do not get 'ripped off', the original example of this being the 60s rock band The Who. They recorded one of their songs in a studio and did not secure a license for their work so it was distributed and made successful without them even getting a penny, (fortunately for them it wasn't their only song).
Finally I'm going to talk about 'lifting' or the concept of fair dealing. You can, in certain circumstances actually take pieces of other journalists work but this does not mean actually stealing their entire articles and the like, it just applies to the facts of a news story which obviously cannot be copyrighted. If the Prime Minister resigns and someone has written the story before you then they do not own the copyright to the story, just the quotes that they may have got for the story; another example is the reporting of the score in a football match. The only time you can get away with taking quotes from another journalists report is if you use the defence of 'fair dealing' to avoid legal action. Mentioning 'the minister tells a newspaper' before a quote that you lifted is all you need, you do not need to name the rival newspaper who you took the quote from.
Thanks for reading my notes on copyright, if you liked this then please look at the rest of my entries and especially the above mentioned blog from Peter Hodges guest lecture.
Stay Classy Internet.
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