Creative iMedia
R093 – The Media Industry
Block 3.4 – Legal issues
3.42 – Intellectual property rights
Intellectual Property Rights, sometimes called IP right, are a really big deal.
This involves copyright, trademarks, and patents, and deals with how you can use images, music, sounds, video and other assets legally. For commercial projects it's a really important issue to deal with properly.
Simply put, using an asset which is copyrighted to someone else without permission could involve an expensive fine and really significant legal issues for a commercial operation.
You need to know the basics of copyright and how it works, as well as about other types of intellectual property. And you need to be aware of this during your portfolio work as well.
Intellectual Property Rights – key learning
IP tasks slide – some tasks that can be done
There's a little more focussed just on images:
What can you do to deal with Intellectual Property issues? Quite a lot actually...
Dealing with Intellectual Property issues – key learning
Dealing with IP tasks slide – some tasks that can be done
There's a worksheet that can be used for the key learning elements of all of this:
IP tasks sheet – a worksheet
Resources
The Royal Photographic Society has a number of useful resources, including on copyright issues (scroll down the page).
Using Assets Tables and Asset Logs
In your portfolio units you can use an assets table to help keep track of intellectual property (or copyright) issues. The exam board provides one that you can use – there's a copy on the Templates page.
There are various ways you can use these. I like to use them to keep track of asset preperation as well, which is a major way to get (or lose) marks.
I've got some examples of the sorts of ways you might like to use them, although there are other perfectly valid ways to use assets tables:
Basic assets table example – the sort you might produce for R094
Multimedia assets table example – the sort you might produce for a project with a greater range of media
These are distinct from asset logs, a type of pre-production document which are used by commercial media companies to help keep track of assets. These will include elements related to intellectual property, as well as to other legal issues, such as whether permits to allow filming have been issues or model release forms been completed.
These aren't completed in the same way you would an assets table for a portfolio.
Example asset log – you probably don't want to use this style for a portfolio