Task 2: Legal & Ethical constraints within the interactive media sector 10:10

My sector of research choice is Interactive media. I shall study this on how it impacts other sectors as the Interactive Media sector is very diverse and has a lot of impact on many other sectors.


Legal and ethical constraints in the Interactive Media sector include:

• The Computer Misuse Act 1990
• Data Protection Act 1998
• Privacy Law
• Copyright and intellectual property law
• Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
• Obscene publications act
• Social Issues and sensitivities
• Linguistic uses and accesibility
• Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C)
• Accesibility Standards
• Moral and Paternal rights
• Intellectual Property Ownership
• Appropriateness to audiences

 I shall focus on how these standards are put in to practice and shall study recent and notorious case-studies and how the standards came in to focus there.


The Computer Misuse Act 1990
The Computer Misuse Act of 1990 is a law in the UK which makes certain types of computer activity illegal. Some of the things that the act focuses on include the breach in to systems you do not have access to breach, the misuse of software for an unintended purpose, assisting somebody to gain access in to a network they do not operate including the access to protected files and directories.


The act is made in to three different sections and makes the following actions illegal under the computer misuse act:

• Unauthorized access to Computer Material.
• Unauthorized access to Computer Systems with intent to commit another offense.
• Unathorized modification of Computer Material.

The first section (Unauthorized access to Computer Material) makes it illegal for somebody to use somebody elses identification to access a system, use a service or to obtain data. This doesn't apply if you have access to use the identification.


The second section (Unauthorized access to Computer Systems with intent to commit another offense) is getting access to a system to commit or facilitate an offense. This covers things like sending a virus through an email application or other harmful material.


The third section (Unathorized modification of Computer Material) means you can't delete, modify or corrupt data files without permission from the authors and administrators of the files.


Data Protection Act 1998
The data protection act is a law that protects peoples personal privacy and holds their rights. It specifically relates to how data is stored, secured and released.


The act helps to make sure information on computers and paper systems is managed properly. The data must be protected using eight principles:

• Personal data shall be obtained and processed fairly and lawfully.
• Personal data shall be obtained only for one or more specified and lawful purposes, and shall not be further processed in any manner incompatible with that purpose or those purposes.
• Personal data shall be adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purpose or purposes for which they are processed.
• Personal data shall be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date.
• Personal data processed for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.
• Personal data shall be processed in accordance with the rights of data subjects under this Act.
• Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.
• Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.

The data protection act was an act created to protect peoples personal information thus allowing certain people to view such information in accordance with the eight principles listed above. The data protection act was passed through Parliament in 1998 and came in to law by 2000.


Privacy Law
This is more of a right than a law as there's not so much law guidelines on this. The earliest definition of privacy law was made by Judge Cooley who described it as "the right to be left alone". In interactive media there's not so much that this has influence on as its mostly a part of common law. It verges on to ethics and the best way to interpret this would be in the use of peoples personal data and making sure this is looked after as made clear by the data protection act. We could also imagine this in the way software uses GPS and to make sure that the user is aware if their GPS is writing their location data and make sure this doesn't get in to the wrong hands and is looked after with as much security as personal data would be treated.


Copyright and intellectual property law
Intellectual property is managed in different ways in the UK. In some laws already made its description is used to form a basis and clarify what is protected across other laws, this reflects in copyright laws. IP law gives an owner exclusive rights to cover their work. In the UK we have a govermental office called the IPO which is the Intellectual Property Office who manage the IP law and regulate IP ownership and issues.


Copyright law in the UK is available on items consisting of:

• Literary work
• Drama work
• Art work
• Musical work
• Typographical work
• Published work
• Sound recordings
• Film
• Broadcasts

The copyright length of somebodys work lasts the life of the author plus seventy years. There are different levels of copyright which have different levels of protection including Crown Copyright which is given out by royals or their serving officers to protect works through the British commonwealth and Parliamentary Copyright is control of work published by the houses of commons.

Case Study: Richard O'Dwyer - TVShack Creator

Richard O'Dwyer is the creator of TV Shack. He is 23 years old and is from Sheffield. TV Shack hosted links to downloads so visitors to his website could download this copyright protected content.

Richard O'Dwyer broken several US Laws and was prosecuted by US authorities after the US Government won an extradition case allowing Richard to be extradited and prosecuted in the USA. His website earned more than £147,000 in advertising revenues until the domain name was seized by US authorities in June of 2010.

Whilst he didn't break any UK laws, he broken USA laws and affected the citizens of the USA. The UK have a treaty with the USA allowing one anothers citizens to be extradited for further prosecution. This is becoming a lot more popular across cases involving the Internet and because there is no global moderation of the service it is left to a countries government to decide the best way of moving forward when laws have been broken.


Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This act is made to protect creative work across a variety of platforms. The platforms that it protects content on includes:

• Literary, Dramatic & Musicals
• Artistic works
• Sound recordings and films
• Broadcast materials
• Cable programmes
• Published works

The act also includes something called the design right. This has two parts. If a design is not registered then it may be protected on regular copyright grounds. If the design is made, on a recorded paper copy at one point, and is registered for design protection, design right prevents people from immitating the design, where as copyright protects people from copying it. The difference is if I were to draw something on paper and later make this 3D, on copyright somebody could re-create the 3D object from an image to get the paper recorded copy, the design act is more in-depth.

Case Study: Yahoo sueing Facebook over ten patent infringements.

This week Yahoo announced that it was taking Facebook to court because Facebook infringed on ten patents that Yahoo own including systems for advertising online. Some of the patents include fraud prevention technologies and social networking technologies too.

In recent years patent purchases have been more of a business move than a practical move. Companies often buy patents that they may not use so they can charge licensing or litigate these matters in courts if people are not willing to pay the intellectual property owners license agreements.Obscene publications act
This act makes it illegal for anything to be shown which is depraved and corrupt, things like torture, necrophillia. If these acts are commited then the offender can face jail terms lasting six months for downloading this material, two years if you were involved producing the content or three years for downloading the material, containing and sharing it, this would include hostin the content or publishing it somewhere.


An example of this can be seen with a banne video game; Manhunt 2. The BBFC refused to classify the game (which they need by law to sell, meaning it's banned) but the developers changed much of the story and re-submitted to the BBFC where after an appeal was classified 18.


http://news.sky.com/home/technology/article/1298000


Social Issues and sensitivities
Sensitivities in Interactive media is of significant importance.


Interactive Media is the use of a computer based system which responds to the users actions.
If the user isn't able to interact with the system then something is clearly wrong. It is because of this that interactive media systems get put through extensive testing. I found WebAIM (Web Accesibility in Mind) which is a website that validates that usability of web pages.


I written a web page to test the systems validation. Screenshots follow.






Above you can see I have written six lines of HTML to test the bare minimum and how the system will respond to this. I believe that the system will pick the code up as having no problems, lets find out.




You can see above the output of the code 'Hello, my name is Gary' and you can see that WAVE has detected no accesibility errors in the code.

 A main test which WAVE helps with is Photosensitive epilepsy and how those users will be affected by the sites layout and content.


Social issues in interactive media covers the influence interactive media holds with its audiences and how that audience engages with the content provided.


BBC iPlayer must cover a majority of audiences from a young person wanting to watch the latest CBBC childrens show to an elderly gentleman who wants to watch his favourite BBC 2 documentary, the navigation and interactive content on iPlayer is the same.

The BBC implement a global masthead as a part of their global experience across BBC websites. This is documented by the BBC User Experience and Design division which created the GEL (Global Experience Language) document which outlines all design instructions to those designing interactive content for the BBC's family of websites. Below you can see I have taken an extract of the documentation surrounding the global masthead which supports the User Interface on BBC iPlayer and its consitency.

 Linguistic uses and accesibility


The language on 4oD is different depending on the content. As we would see on an EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) we have the description of what is being shown, summarised. I shall compare the use of linguistics in the marketing on 4oD of 'Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story' with that of 'Hollyoaks'. The content will clearly have different descriptions as they are not the same, are different target audiences but further than this, the audiences will interact in different ways.

The first thing I notice comparing the description is that there's three paragraphs, a lot more description than is used in Hollyoaks. I would say the target group for this programme is middle class and upper working class, ages of between 25 to 50's, quite vast but I imagine the documentary is targetted more towards the social class. In the first paragraph we get the background to the show, and what it is all about. This is perhaps the most important paragraph as if an audience doesn't like whats in here they will not continue reading the description. In the second paragraph we are told what the programme is actually doing. In the third paragraph we get a summary of what the programme is about and what we can expect. I imagine this paragraph being written for educated users because of the use of keywords like "polemical'. To end the description we have a sentence on how viewers can engage and get their opinion across about the programme, there's a rhetorical question asking our opinion and this is then answered allowing the audience to engage on-site with the comments section or on Twitter with a hashtag supplied to us.

You can see in this description that we have two paragraphs and only one which is actually to do with the programme. The first paragraph gives us an overview of what the programme is about and specifically mentions the characters in the show. I think that the audience of Hollyoaks would not read too much in to a description because the show is a soap opera so this would spoil the story for them if they were to read a lot on this. The second paragraph is in regards to subjects covered in the programme. Because this is a soap opera, it aims to cover real life issues and demonstrate these issues in the programmes format, there is a URL provided for viewers to find out more on this information.


Accesibility
The Internet is hugely popular in todays society, more and more webmasters are making sure that their content is available and accesible for people of all different abilities. Guidelines are published concerning this on W3's website and as previously covered in social issues, through the use of WebAIM.


W3 is the organisation who manage the standards of the web and their name stands for The World Wide Web Consortium. W3 provide services to validate web pages with the language they were written in. W3 also publish information on making your website accesible.


I am going to validate my personal website to ensure it is valid Hypertext Markup Language. I wrote my website in HTML 5 which is still being developed and expanded upon by the W3 Consortium. See the screenshot below in W3C section.

  
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium


The consortium is a group made up of full-time staff, member organizations and the public all work together with the inventory of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The mission of the W3C is to lead the web to its full potential.


They create a set of standards to make the web accesible and to make it work as imagined by the consortium. You can see my use of the W3C validator above this in testing my own website which passed the validation test for HTML5.

See the validation.

Accesibility Standards


The W3 Consortium publish information including accessibility guidelines for web content and they also have a whole site for the Web Accessibility Initiative which gives case studies on how to improve your content with lots of helpful information for making your content more accessible.


Below are the Web Content Accessibility guidelines as reccommended by W3C, In italics is my explanation of the guidelines.

1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content.
   This means when you are giving out information, try to use different formats, like podcasts, videos or images.
2. Don't rely on colour alone.
   This guideline is more to do with design, if you use only colour then this will be difficult for people with vision impairments to use and see.
3. Use markup & style sheets and do so properly.By markup the guidline means HTML, make sure all of the code functions as intended. In the style sheets make sure all the code is working with the markup across all of your pages and provide alternate styles if you feel people with vision impairments would have difficulty seeing as default.
4. Clarify natural language usage.In your markup, make sure all punctuation and glyphs display correctly. An example of what this is, in your markup do not enter the ampersand ( & ) you should enter " & " as the code to display an ampersand.
5. Create tables that transform gracefully.
   In your markup label any tables you might have correctly so different user-agents are able to access the data held in them.
6. Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully.
   This guideline means making sure that your tables work well in most browsers.
7. Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes.This guideline will affect visitors with cognitive or visual disabilities. If a text is moving or moving quite quickly then those with cognitive or visual disabilities may become distracted and they may not be able to read this information.
8. Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces.Make all of your content accesible as intended at its raw production. If you are using embedded information and something happens to result in this embedded data not displaying, have an alternative solution for the content.
9. Design for device-independence.
   Ensure that your content works as intended. Think of users who shall be interacting with the content without a pointing device, perhaps using voice input or a keyboard.
10. Use interim solutions.
    This guideline refers to older browsers, when implementing new technologies, make sure you have a work around for those using older browsers.
11. Use W3C technologies and guidelines.This guideline refers to making sure all of your markup is validated by W3 and if you're not able to then make sure that alternative content is provided for these unvalidated areas of markup. Also, ensure that accessibility guidelines are followed as reccommended.
12. Provide context and orientation information.
    This guideline asks you to provide instructions for complex pages and features.
13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms.
    Make sure that navigation systems are simple and understandable to navigate. Also provide a site map if possible.
14. Ensure that documents are clear and simple.If a document is clear and simple, it will be understood by the user interacting with the content.

As a real world practice many organisations implement their own set of standards if they're a large corporation which branches off from the W3 standards in supporting the brand image.


The BBC is a great example of this. They are a modern day British broadcaster who represent every day life in the United Kingdom. The BBC as we have seen their GEL documents cover everything design related but focuses entirely on the design and not so much on accessibility directly. The BBC have another set of documentation for this and created the guideline of 'Future Media Standards and Guidelines'. The guidelines are written in regards to the publishing of content and how the content is accessed. The guidelines surround implementing alternative content to all core content unless it can be proven practically or technically impossible to creating alternative text for all images, where they even have another set of guidelines for this.


The BBC take their accesibility so far that they implement it in their websites markup using RDFa (Resource Description Framework - in attributes). It is a W3C reccommendation which adds a set of attribute level extensions to XHTML markup. RDFa is great for large websites to use and offers five benefits in implamentation:

1. It allows each website to use its own set of standards.
2. It allows the re-use of data, RDFa will not duplicate data it doesn't need to.
3. It allows the data to be self-contained. The markup is kept seperately from the RDF.
4. The structure is modular and attributes in the RDF are re-usable.
5. It evolves with the site. Attributes can be added to the RDF and the markup can extract this data.

The BBC website is Valid XHTML and RDFa, validated by W3 Validator.

Moral and Paternal rights

Paternal rights are for the author of the protected content, this can not be a transferred right when getting protection as an author except on death.

Paternal rights were bought in to law as a part of the Copyright, design and patents act of 1988. Paternal rights is for only an author of content, content created as a piece of work for a client or employer as the client or employer becomes the content owner and is not protected by this law, but other laws including copyright laws.

Moral rights is the right for creators of copyrighted works to have the right of attribution over their work. This includes the publishing of work anonymously or pseuonymously. The rights were first recognized by France and Germany and is now a part of EU law. The copyright holder does need to add an assertion to their work in most cases, this is usually seen on a beginning page in books.

Intellectual Property Ownership

Intellectual property ownership is a type of intellectual property that's obtained as a result of grant or registration through assigning the right to another body.

In the United Kingdom, the body that is responsible for governing Intellectual Property Ownership is the Intellectual Property Office (IPO). They are a government body responsible for Intellectual property (IP) and the IP rights they govern include:

• Patents
• Designs
• Trade marks
• Copyright

Each year the IPO publish a report with what they have done over the year so the public have a greater idea over the types of things that they do.

Appropriateness to audiences

The appropriateness of a product to an audience is something used consistently through the development of an interactive product. If an interactive product is not engagable with its audience then it is not an interactive product, because its audience can not interact with it.

We can see design playing a huge role in this and often simplicity is key. I am going to compare the navigation of two websites with the same purpose.

I am going to compare two very different websites, both sell fabric online.

Cheap fabrics has a smart navigatable page with a navigation at the side of the page that is consistent through out the website. They have an interactive applet in the page centre and a special navigation in a set of squares at the right which has features in the spaces. The page also has a search facility and a live help support option to chat with site speicialists live. The site is using white purple, green and grey as its main colour scheme. Purple to draw attention, green for highlights and the logo, white is the background colour and grey is used with the pages type.

Fabric Land has a very old design despite it being regularly updated. I found a lot of broken elements on the site including navigatable manu's and hyperlinks. The website makes use of a lot of animated GIF images which are distractive to cognitive users. The pages navigation is to the left which is natural as this is where users read from but it is hard to use as it isn't stratisfied like Cheap Fabrics and has a link for every product and does not have one style for this. Across the website the design changes a lot and there is no consistancy. I did not find any interactive elements on the page.

Comparing the two websites, I found Cheap Fabrics to be used as more of an eCommerce website and is more focused on the end user and generating sales. Whereas Fabric Land has just added a lot of information about the product over the company itself. The webmasters of each company are able to use their websites however they like but I find Fabric Land to not be fit for purpose as a website because it is very far behind the modern day standards of web practise.