Joe Patterson

What are legal and ethical constraints? Legal Constraints  Legal constraints are legal laws that allow certain groups to control the media sector and it’s extremely important to everyone to follow these rules or laws or you could be fined and investigated by the police. Ethical Constraints  Ethics are moral principles that say how anyone should act. This means that you are working within a society where you have to behave properly without offending anyone.

Acts that might affect films  The film industry has legal requirements to follow to make sure that all films have not got any materials that could offend the audience. There are several organisations that help the film industry to protect the people who are watching the films. Here are the companies below that set the rules and regulations.  British Board of Film Classification  OFCOM  Human Rights Act  Race Relations Act

British Board of Film Classification  The BBFC is an independent, non governmental company that classifies films.  The BBFC censors for age rating was introduced in 1912 by the British film industry.  In the cinema they show all of the age certificates for each film. U,PG,12A,15,18.

Copyright  Copyright is a piece of work that is owned by an author who created the piece of work.  People are not allowed to copy any copyright work by publishing anything without permission.  Copyright is one of the key terms that affect the film industry because films have been downloaded illegally and have been copied and pasted onto hard drives illegally and have been converted onto DVDs and it is known as piracy.

OFCOM  OFCOM is a regulatory body operated in the UK  Their job is to regulate the TV and radio sectors  They make sure that people are protected from harmful or offensive material as they check the material that is used  They also specialize in what people are downloading off the internet for e.g. TV shows, music and films and here is a bar chart of what percentage of people are downloading illegal property which is called piracy.

Human Rights Act 1998  The Human Rights Act came into force on 10 th October 2000 and is operated in the United Kingdom. The act is also known as the HRA and it protects the rights of people.  Here is a link to the website.   Here is another link on how the public liability faces with film industry and how it affects religious beliefs.  guide/legislation/other-legislation guide/legislation/other-legislation

Race Relations  The Race Relations Act are legislation acts that make sure we must respect all races and not to discriminate on any racial grounds because it is wrong.  In film and TV they need to make sure that they do not discriminate on any race or religion by racist language.  Some recent films like Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave have been complained about because of the cruelty and discrimination that was used in these two films.  Here is a link to YouTube about the N word used multiple times in Django Unchained. 

Ethical Constraints  Ethical constraints are principles that can define how a person or group acts.  There are ethical issues that film and TV producers that can be affected from these ethical constrains. Here are examples:  Representation of Gender/Men and Women in movies.  Truth Act/Knowing if your telling the truth or misleading.  Privacy Act.  Representation of Religious Beliefs/to respect all different beliefs.

Conclusion  I have learned that film producers have to be very careful when they are making films that they are not doing anything wrong.  They need to know all of the policies so they do not do anything illegal or no one gets offended by anything that has been shown in any films.  If they break any of these rules the film could get banned or the film producer could get sued.  For example the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange was heavily blamed for its sexually and violent content in the film so Kubrick banned the film in Britain and America but it got 4 Oscar nominations including best picture.