You’re covering a story about school bullies and want to use extracts from victims’ Facebook pages to illustrate the problem – can you do so legally, or ethically?
You’re liveblogging a protest meeting when an organiser defames a leading local businessman, can you include that in your report?
Twitter users, bloggers and those using other social media are not immune from the law as prosecutions have shown. This course will deal specifically with the legal threats as they apply to these new media and how to avoid legal difficulties, with particular reference to problems concerning social media and copyright.
This one-day course is delivered by a mixture of presentations and workshops where time will be put aside for candidates to work in groups to address a series of increasingly complex scenarios based on problems faced by publishers in real life.
The course will also include a full update on the changes to the law introduced by the Defamation Act 2013
Who should attend?
- Anyone writing news, sport or features for print, broadcast or online who has not had a refresher in the past 12-18 months.
- Users of social media
At the end of the day participants will be able to:
• Confidently use a range of social media in a journalistic setting while knowing how to avoid major legal pitfalls
• Use social media as a research tool, while avoiding issues of privacy and ethical problems
• Use social media to obtain material while avoiding breach of copyright
• Know how to protect their own intellectual copyright in words and pictures they place online
What was said after the last course run by David:
“Very useful, with advice from a highly regarded media law expert.” Sarah Batley
“Very eye opening course, freedom of speech defence is not enough anymore! Very informative.” Samantha Castle
