Legal and social concerns
Social and ethical issues are covered in more detail in chapter 7: Issues. Here the focus is on some important issues in the area of multimedia.
Copyright
The Copyright Act 1968 (Cwlth), amended in 2010, controls
the right of authors and artists to ownership of their creative
and intellectual property. Remember that using graphic
images or video without permission is stealing unless it is
permitted under special copyright provisions.
Software piracy
Full-version multimedia authoring software is expensive to
purchase, but it is also very expensive to develop. Every
copy used illegally deprives the creators and publishers of
their income.
Social implications
Apart from ethical issues, multimedia has important social
implications as well. It has the ability to change the way
people live, learn and work, which places a responsibility on
those who design multimedia to consider the effects of their
work on society.
Convergence of technologies
The merging of separate technologies is a trend already well
under way. Multimedia technologies are becoming available
in places they would never have been seen previously. The
mobile phone, the Internet, the DVD player, the MP3 player
and the TV can all deliver and display multimedia.
Limitations in technology
At present, the availability of multimedia products on the
Internet is limited by restrictive bandwidths. Other
bottlenecks can be experienced within an organisation’s
intranet. The limitation of bandwidth is lessening, however,
and Internet delivery of multimedia will become
commonplace.
