Legal Issues
Having intellectual property helps prevent others from stealing or copying your work that you either created or bought the rights to. If self-employed, then usually the creator is automatically given intellectual property rights, however, intellectual property rights can be bought by others through contracts or commissions for temporary or long-term ownership. If a photo was created as part of work whilst employed, then the employer will gain the intellectual property rights.
Copyright, patents, designs and trademarks are a few examples of intellectual property protection that is either given automatically or must be applied for. Having intellectual property protection makes it easier to take legal action against those who attempt to steal or copy the work. However, an issue that has appeared in recent years is the user agreements on social media that means whatever is posted these sites and apps can be claimed by them to use however they wish. Social media is an effective way for a photographer to gain new audiences to their work, but these companies, such as Facebook, can claim rights to use, modify or transmit any media that is posted on their site. They essentially can take ownership of a photographer’s work. Callum Sinclair, a partner of the Intellectual Property and Technology law firm DLA Piper, explains that “because you are publishing on these company’s services, you may have already forfeited any sort of intellectual property rights you may have had to such content”. The terms and conditions of many of these social media sites and apps state that “you own your content, but we can just use it however we want”(Sinclair, C. 2013).
Ethical Issues
In photography there are many issues regarding ethics, especially now in the modern age. Digital editing software now exists to allow photographers to edit and enhance their images but this can cause problems when it is used to manipulate the truth, especially in regards to photojournalism. Most newspapers must feed the demand and expectations from readers to tell the truth, yet their reputation for honesty can easily be tarnished by a manipulated photograph that was meant to document the truth. Brian Walski was a 20-year veteran of the news business and a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times before he was fired immediately in 2003 for altering a news image. The photo is question was of the Iraq war which was the product of merging two photographs together to alter the composition in order to make the photo more effective and powerful.
Many photography contests for photojournalism have recently implemented a rule that a photograph’s RAW file must also be presented in order to check whether the final image has been altered too much from the original. Many contestants in these competitions have been disqualified on such grounds which presents the idea “that some photojournalists think any degree of lying and manipulation is O.K.” (Lyttle, M. 2015).
btec level 3 photography 