Legal and Ethical Issues in Media and Information

• Intellectual Property (IP): referring to the “creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names, and images used in commerce” (World Intellectual Property Organization, 2016).
• Two categories of IP

  • Industrial Property
  • Copyright
• Industrial Property: which includes patents, trademarks, industrial designs, and geographical indications and appellations of origin.
• Patent: The granting of a property right by a sovereign authority to an inventor.
• Trademarks: protect the words, phrases, symbols, logos, or other devices used to identify the source of goods or services from usage by other competitors.
• Industrial Designs: the ornamental or aesthetic aspect of an article. Design, in this sense, may be three- dimensional features (shape or surface of an article), or two-dimensional features (patterns or lines of color).
• Geographical Indications: serve to identify a product that originates from a specific geographical area and that has a quality, reputation, or other characteristics that are essentially attributable to its geographical origin.
• Appellations of Origin: refers to a sign that indicates that a product originates in a specific region, but is limited to those cases where the characteristic qualities of the product are due to the geographical environment, including natural and human factors, of that region
• Copyright: which covers literary works (such as novels, poems, and plays), films, music, artistic works (e.g. drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures), and architectural design.
• RA 8293 – Intellectual property code/RA 10175 – Cybercrime Act: Both laws protect intellectual property rights, allowing the rightful creators or owners of patents, trademarks, or copyrighted works to benefit from their own work or creation – may it be of moral or material interests. Violation of this law or one of the rights is called infringement.
• Fair Use: It is a legal principle stating that one can use a copyrighted work without a license for the following purposes: commentary, criticism, reporting, research, and teaching.
• Creative Commons License: copyright licenses provide a simple and standardized way to give the public permission to share and use the creative work.
• Conditions on Fair Use

  1. amount and substantiality of the portion taken
  2. purpose and character of one’s use;
  3. nature of the copyrighted work;
  4. potential market effect

  one must own most of the new content, give full credit to the original source, use the content for non-profit purposes to consider it fair use.
• Validity Period

  A) 50

  B) 25

  C) 50

  D) 50

  E) 50

  F) 20

  G) 10

  H) 10

  I) 20