Legal and Ethical Constraints Applicable to Interactive Media

Your current project requires that you produce a:

• Report
• Blog Article
• Presentation
• Video

about the legal and ethical contraints that apply to interactive media products. These might include:

Legal Constraints

• Checking intellectual property rights
  - Copyright
  - Design rights
  - Moral and paternal rights
  - Trademarks
  - Patents
• Obtaining permissions
• Libel
• Race Relations Act
• Obscene Publications Act
• Computer Misuse Act
• Data Protection Act
• Accessibility
• Contracts
  - Types of contract
  - Subcontracting
  - Outsourcing
  - Working to a brief
  - Penalties

Ethical Constraints

• Authorship and ownership issues
• Representation
  - Race
  - Gender
  - Age
• Blasphemy
• Appropriateness to audience

You are fully aware of the criteria you must meet, as you cover these points, for each of the available grades. Generally the more clarity with which you explain them, the better use you make of examples and the more fluent your use of subject terminology the higher your grade.

Plagiarism

It will no doubt be very tempting to find other people's explanations and copy and paste. First, this activity has legal and ethical issues all of its own. Second, if you plagiarise you will be subject to an academic disciplinary process and could fail the unit or worse. How will I know? We have software that compares student submissions to work on the internet and tells us what % was plagiarised.

It is much better to read other people's work, understand it, then write up what you understand in your own words. That's real learning that is.

Citing Sources

You should include a bibliography at the end of your report (or provide it printed at the time of your presentation or with your video).

A bibliography lists all the places (sources) from which you got your information. This includes books, magazines, TV programmes and web pages.

You may quote other sources, but when you do you should surround the quote in quotation marks "" and cite the source within parenthesis (), e.g:

"Intellectual Property Office can help you get the right type of protection for your creation or invention." (Intellectual Property Office, http://www.ipo.gov.uk/)

or

"Whereas composers and authors get to keep their rights for 70 years after they die - or rather, their heirs do - for performers, the cut-off point comes 50 years after the original performance." (BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/11/conflict_over_copyright.html)

Good luck.