Interactive_Media_Practices

Understanding legal and ethical constraints applicable to the interactive media industry When working in the media industry there are a few important issues you need to take into consideration, two of them issues are ‘legal constraints’ and ‘ethical constraints’. Legal constraints: Legal constraints are matters such as checking intellectual property rights, which includes copyright, design rights and moral rights, trademarks and patents etc. You would also need to take into account obtaining permissions; race relations act; accessibility and data protection act. Ethical Constraints: Ethical constraints are things such as Appropriateness to audience; representation of race, gender and age; blasphemy; Authorship and Ownership rights. The reasons why these constraints exist and the purpose of them is to act as a guideline when creating a media product to help avoid stealing or copying anyone’s material, offending anyone with your product and making it viable and accessible for your audience. The reason behind why copyright laws are set up is to encourage the concept of new ideas and protect artists, authors, musicians etc from having their inventions stolen. If the copyright laws did not exist then people would be apprehensive about sharing or revealing any ideas to anyone in case there work was copied and sold on as somebody else’s work. The money side to copyright is very important as well. If you didn’t copyright a piece of work you had done for example if a musician records a song – sells the song without copyright – somebody else could claim that they had written the song and collect money for the song. One example of copy right infringement is a case – fortunately – won by queen of hip hop Beyonce Knowles. Jennifer Armour alleged that she had submitted the track ‘Baby Boy’ for consideration to Matthew Knowles, Beyonce’s father/manager. However, The Fifth Court of Appeals in the USA ruled in favour Beyonce after being convinced by evidence showing that ‘Baby Boy’ had already been finished when Armour submitted her track. The case was dropped with no evidence available to show that the two tracks were in fact the same song. A trademark is a symbol that distinguishes your product from other products of a rival competitor. The sign can be a combination of words or images and having a distinctive logo help people recognise your product. An example of a successful trademark is the Apple Mac logo, the apple symbolises a whole cooperation without any words or slogan and is recognised all around the world. A patent allows you to stop others from copying and selling your invention without your authorization. A patent should be enough on its own to prevent others from exploiting your invention or idea. However, in some cases it doesn’t but the patent gives you the right to take legal actions and claim against them. A design right gives you guaranteed protection for the shape or formation of an original design. They also allow you to prevent anybody from copying the configuration of the product, they don’t however give you protection for the two dimensional features like patterns. Another matter you need to consider is the accessibility in your interactive media product. Some disabilities can make it difficult for somebody to understand interactive media. These include vision and hearing impairments and dyslexia. In Interactive Media, accessibility relates to a user group that has trouble using interactive media. This means that interactive media needs to be as user-friendly as possible so that it is accessible to people with these disabilities. Things such as bigger text in simple fonts and good contrast in the colour of text and background can make it easier for somebody with a visual impairment to use. These issues can also apply to people with dyslexia. To make an Interactive Media product more straightforward to somebody with a hearing impairment, text should appear simultaneously when any important audio information is being played so that they can keep up with what’s happening. Appropriateness to audience is a major factor in interactive media, especially stereotypes. Whether it is men and women, black and white or young and old - stereotypes can have a negative affect a person’s perception of themselves and could encourage unnecessary behaviour therefore they are all a massive area of debate among interactive media regulations. For example if Nintendo brought out a dance game on the Wii and in the advertisement there were only girls using the game; it could discourage boys from buying the game as they would think it was a ‘girls game’ when really it is just a dance enthusiast’s game. The same goes with young and old; if a game was brought out with kids used in the advertisement it might seem to the slightly older generation of people to think that they are too old for the game and again would stop them from using the game. The representation of race is also very important and nowadays people are very cautious when using different races to portray different characters or actions. For example there is an app on the iPhone called ‘Ghetto Tweets’ and the icon for the app is the hope image with Barrack Obama on it. The app is an add on for Twitter and translates your Twitter posts into ‘gangster slang’. The fact that a black man – being possibly the most famous black man on the planet – is used to trademark this app can have an effect on people’s perception of how a black person speaks and make people think that it was reality when in fact the way someone speaks has nothing to do with race. In my interactive DVD menu there are some constraints I have stayed within although there are some where I have perhaps broken the rules or regulations slightly. One example of my broken constraints could be the fact that I have portrayed London to always have bad weather, which is stereotypical and I have done this by having my intro as a rain cloud pouring over the London skyline. This would imply to the people using my product that London is always cloudy and raining when – although it is common – it is not always the case. All my text is easily accessible for people with slight visual impairments. The font I have used is very clean and simple and I have applied a good level of contrast between the text and background making it clear and easy to read. Unfortunately I didn’t get round to adding sound to my guide therefore it would not be suitable for somebody who was completely blind as there would be no indication of what was happening. When I have time to reconstruct my work this will be one of the major points of correction. Overall I think I have used a good use of interactive media practices and have remained scarcely inside the rules and regulations of the legal and ethical constraints and have delivered an accessible interactive media product that is suitable for anybody to use and be comfortable with.