Legal and Ethical constraints that apply to social media and website design.

Copyright

Definition: Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time.

Andy Warhol was once sued for copyright infringement for using photos that he hadn't taken himself and changing them to make them his own work, although some people call it appropriation others would call it stealing. If people have copyrighted something and another person uses it without giving credit to the person it belongs to then they can be sued, copy right is exactly what it says it gives you the right to copy the thing that has been copyrighted.

Another case of copyright infringement/appropriation is Roy Lichtenstein, he painted Kiss V. When this painting was changed slightly and used as an album cover the artist of the cover was confronted with a claim that she copied Lichtenstein's work but Roy hadn't been honest about his original source, as it turns out the album artist had just used the same source.

Intellectual property rights

Definition: A right that is had by a person or a company to have exclusive rights to use its own ides, plans or other intangible assets without the worry of competition.

This protects ownership of your work as an artist, writer, photographer, designer, musician etc. It protects anything that come up with that may only be in your mind so far, inventions are sometimes stolen and that is against intellectual property rights because it was not their idea or work to use. 

Permissions

If you want to use something that has been trademarked or copyrighted and you don't want to break the law you can ask the person who copyrighted or trademarked it for their permission to use it. This makes us able to use it without any law suits and the person who owns it knows that it is being used, who is using it and what it is being used for.

Libel and sensitivity to groups of society

What you say or show in your work can be seen by many people of different genders, religions and ethnicities, what you say and show can offend people and so you need to make sure that you don't put anything into your work that can offend people because it may put people off buying products that you are advertising or they might even complain about your work and it could be banned.

Decency

Decency involves any rude explicit or inappropriate work, children could see your work any most parents wouldn't want their children seeing anything that they couldn't. This also affects people of different religions as in some religions nudity is frowned upon and again they could find it very offensive to see.

Safeguarding

Age restrictions are usually put on games and films to show that their content is for people above a certain age, this prevents young children seeing things in them such as nudity or violence. People who buy the game/film have to be of the age (or above) the age restriction on the game/film, unless bought by a parent, this is so that children cannot buy games or films that contain things that they shouldn't see but if their parent buys it for them their parent obviously then knows that they might see something of this nature.