Magazine Assignment : Copyright and model release forms

Copyright lesson work sheet :

What is copyright and who/what it protects,.
copyright is the protection of creative works and provides the creater ownership. Under the law the Copyright Act 1988 the work is protected from:

•  Others trying to copy the work 
• Rent, lend or issues of the work to the public 
• To perform of show the peice on a public platform without crediting the creater.
• Any adaptions to the work.

It protects many of the creative arts including ;

1. Literary 
2. images
3. logos
4. dramatic 
5. artistic work
6. music 
7. published editions 
8. film
9. sound recordings 

Justify why copyright is important.
Without the use of copyright artists wold struggle to make money from there work as others could simply claim it is there own and sell it on. This means the creaters would lose rights to the image and could not protect the use of it in advertising or public uses.

Explain what steps you could take to not break the law.
If you want an image that has no copyright you could use the search tools on Google images and select usage rights and then find an image which is labeled allowing you to use it for the situation you want this could be for commercial or not. If you have found your perfect image and it is copyrighted the first thing you could do is email or get in contact with the owner of the copyright and see if they are fine with you using it if they are not you could offer them free advertising or some may want money depending on the occasian this might change. Some may  just want to be credited when you do use the work.There is only one acception that allows you to use the work freely this is called fair use this allows you to use the peice for an example or to make critical comment. The best thing to do is to contact the owner.

Explain how you can protect your work.
To protect you own creative work you could do one of two things firstly you could imbed the copyright information this can be done on photo editing programmes such as Photoshop you simply have to open up the file information and imput the details including a copyright logo. The other way of imprinting copyright is placing a watermark over the image this is hard to remove and means that only you have the original image although there is faults because people do remove them but not very often.

Justify the use of model release forms 
model release forms are used when models are needed for image that are going to be sold for adverts,marketing or any other other publications. They explain the agreement between you and your model and the photos that you are taking. They things that are normally included are :

• The location 
• The date and time of the shoot
• How the photos will be stored and used
• Consent signatures from all those needed
• They should explain how the model is protected 
• The names of participants including the company conducting the photo shoot 
• The addressses
• Contact details 

You may also need permission forms for things such as the location you are using and the clothes the model is wearing. You must also be careful of the use of photos of minors as this would need special permission from the perents.

For my photo shoot I created my own model release form that covers all that is need as explained above . Here it is : 

During the photoshoot I managed to get my model to sign the form allowing me to use the images here is evidence :