Legal and Ethical considerations when working in the Creative Media Sectors

Media Ethics

Chapter 2: "Understanding the ethical and legal considerations when working in the creative media sector"

As a producer/company you need to know that there are certain laws that you have to abide by if these rules are not taken under consideration you might not be able to publish your work around due to ethical issues surrounding it for example you might get copyrighted which means you wouldn't be able to publish your work as some of that work does not belong to you, this is the Copy, Designs and Patents Act 1988 which means you need permission to use anybody else's work that is not free domain this work could be anything from music to logos to animation character designs. An example of this copyright law being broken was with Apple they were accused by Chinese writers and two companies for copying off there work, they claimed that unlicensed copies of their books were being sold on the Apple online website the court made Apple pay them £100,000 in compensation, this is not the only legal issue that apple have faced, in 2000 a chinese company named Proview claimed they owned the rights to Ipad and not Apple, Apple later paid the company $60 million to gain the rights off Proview.

Other problems are like if you suggest that racial/sexual controversy are unequal as content should not disturb the idea of equal rights, the content must not suggest that any race or sex are unequal this is known as the Equal Opportunities Act 2011. An example are Nestle's yorkie bars used to have a slogan to say that it wasn't for women because they're not tough enough this suggests that all females are less tough than males therefore suggesting there unequal in a way. Another example is CNN a news network that got sued by its own employees for racial discrimination the employees found out that they were receiving a lower salary than the other employees because of their ethnic origin, a 44 year old employee claimed that she worked longer hours than others and still was discriminated against because of her sex and race, a lawsuit was opened and the problem was fixed the company now gives equal salary to all their employees fairly.

However there are more complex things that production companies need to look out for such as confidentiality any company involved in a production must not have any information they should know kept from them or someone giving someone else secret information that is not meant to hold the information, this is known as the Official Secrets Act 1989. An example of this was Richard Tomlinson who was a former MI6 officer who was sentenced to a year in prison in 1997 for passing secrets to an Austrian publisher.

The Obscene Publication Act says that any content can not be obscene enough that it is "likely to deprave or corrupt" the viewer which it is intending to do this relates to extreme violence, drug usage or sexual content. Movies must not show highly disturbing content as this is seen as morally wrong for viewers to see, a movie that was banned for morale issues was "a Texas chainsaw massacre" the movie was marketed as a true story even though the plot was only loosely based similar to the Ed Gein murders this began the movies controversy as it was displaying itself falsely to its audience.

The privacy law is the regulation that protects a person from publicity over personal information in the Sachsgate case this involved information about Sachs daughter being publicized by Russel Brand and Jonathan Ross this consequently broke the privacy law. So in a media context the privacy law would be revealing personal/private information about somebody on websites/media which would break the privacy law. Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand were on a radio show together on the Russell Brand show starring Jonathan Ross, Sachs who played Manuel from a famous British comedy Fawlty towers, was supposed to star on a phone call during the show however Sachs did not pick up so Jonathan and Russell decided to leave him a voice message that involved some inappropriate suggestions involving Sachs's granddaughter this involved Jonathan Ross spurting out the words "he fucked your granddaughter" this was the main problem with what they said as it upset Sachs a lot and also the BBC received over 2,000 complaints about the program, and it resulted in Jonathan and Russel being fired and also being fined £150,000 from Ofcom.

Libel law is when information is given out about somebody that is false, if this information is negative it goes against the libel law as you are negatively depicting someone with false information this can not only be done from written articles but in videos and even just gestures in videos or suggestions in audio to suggest false information about somebody. an example of this law being potentially broken was that there was a news article about David Beckham claiming that he had an affair David went on to say this information was false and tried to sue the person who made this statement however David got rejected by the US judge. 

The Health and Safety Act suggests that you must minimise health risks as much as possible and not put anyone in danger unknowingly, a way to minimise accidents is to fill out risk assessments this lets people know the potential risks and how to avoid them also how to treat the problem if there is one, this assessment shows that the company and workers know what the risks are and how to cope with them. Randall Miller a film director wanted to make a film called "Midnight Rider" this film contained a dream sequence on train tracks, Randall did not properly see the risks in this as he did not know when trains ran on the tracks also the person filming in this scene was strapped to a hospital bed so if a train did come they would not have enough time to get out with all of these hazards a train did come and ended up hitting the actor in the scene Sarah Jones who died due to this accident, Randall was charged with manslaughter and was sent to prison for this accident.

Media ethics is the broad term describing the proper modes of behavior to which all branches of the modern media should attempt to adhere. The branches of the media that try to live up to ethical standards include television, print communications, and the Internet. Different issues arise depending upon the branch of the media in question, issues made more complicated by burgeoning technology. Many of the complications in media ethics arise from the conflict of ethical standards and the media companies' desire to make money.