Ethics and Responsibilities: Creative Rights

Copyright Symbol

Creative Rights

Have you ever written a text, taken a picture, or recorded an original video and wanted to share it with the world? If you have, you fall under the wide umbrella of "content creator", which means your creations have certain protections under law. Copyright, denoted by ©, means that the author of that work must grant permission before their work can be shared, changed, or copied. Note however, that under at least US law, copyright only covers works for so long before they are moved to what is called the public domain (Common Sense Education, 2017). Anything under public domain can be used fully, by everyone.

Now, fair use is arguably the category most need to be aware of. There are instances where you will want to use copyrighted material, and you may not be able or want to get permission from the creator. You can use their work, but there are some restrictions. For starters, the copied section must only be a small part of the original work. Taking an entire chapter of a book and inserting it into your essay while citing where it came from is all well and good, but now you are distributing a large chunk of this creator's work, without telling them or giving them monetary compensation. What if they are selling this book? If they are, that leads to another point of fair use everyone needs to know: borrowed material cannot interfere with the value of the original work. Handing out large pieces of said book for free could harm the author's profits. What you can do is take a content creator's work and change it so the purpose behind it is not the same, therefore only making a sort of parody off it, while still citing the original author. Or, and this one is relevant to all the students out there, citing a nonfiction piece, especially for educational reasons, is considered fair use (Common Sense Education, 2017). However, bear in mind that just because something is fact, and you are including it in a project or something similar, you still need to cite the work from which you got it from. Not doing so, for nonfiction or not, is plagiarism.

Why Should You Care?

Imagine slaving away for weeks to code an amazing game, then excitedly put it up on your portfolio site, only for someone else to put your game for sale on an app store without so much as mentioning you. This random person could be earning hundreds of dollars or more, while you get nothing. Or worse, someone could rip off your game without your permission, credit you, and warp it into something that paints you in a bad light as a joke. It is the responsibility of everyone who ever wants to enrich themselves with other's work to give credit where it's due, while also staying true to the original intention of the creator. 

Misrepresentation

In journalism of any kind, writers and content creators are endowed with a responsibility to their viewership: to report the truth in an ethical manner. They can tell stories yes, but those stories cannot be ones that are only able to be told because they were taken out of context. As Sanhueza-Lyon in Multimedia Ethics explained, multimedia type news can be especially challenging to frame in a way that does not manipulate viewers into thinking a certain way about a piece. It can be tempting to redo shots over and over to get the video clips that demonstrate the idea you want your audience to have, and in doing so removing all authenticity. Journalists need to be mindful of how far they should take each story and what is acceptable for the audience and the platform you reach out to.

 

 

References

Common Sense Education. (2017, September 30). Creativity, Copyright and Fair Use. Common Sense Education. https://www.commonsense.org/education/videos/creativity-copyright-and-fair-use

Winslow, D. R. (2023). Multimedia Ethics. Multimedia Ethics; National Press Photographers Association. https://nppa.org/magazine/article/9071

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