Careers and Copyright

So you want a career that includes Visual Communication!

A career is not defined as a job or occupation. It is the sum total of all your roles, knowledge, choices, passions and experiences. Your career path will be unique. You may take what you have learned in this course and apply it to a scrapbooking hobby, or making home movies, or slide shows, etc. That would be part of your career, not your occupation. If you want to use those skills in a future occupation you may need to search for more information so you can make informed decisions about what direction your path will take. A great source about occupation info in Canada is the National Occupational Classification also known as NOC (pronounced knock).

The NOC organizes over 30,000 job titles into 520 occupational group descriptions. It is used daily by thousands of people to compile, analyze and communicate information about occupations, and to understand the jobs found throughout Canada's labour market. It is used to collect and organize occupational statistics and to provide labour market information.

Here are all the links to all areas that may apply the content you have learned in this course. Have a look at areas that may be of interest to you.

Photographer:

Check out this short video on the job description of a photographer:

Film and Video Camera Operators

Check out this short video on tje job of Film and Video Camera Operators:

Graphic Designer:

Check out this short video on the job and skills needed to become a graphic designer:

To learn more about careers in the graphic design field, check out the National Occupational Classification website

Canadian Copyright law protects creative endeavours by ensuring that the creator has the sole right to authorize their publication, performance or reproduction (section 3(1)). Copyright applies to all original:

Copyright also applies to three other kinds of subject matter: performer’s performances (section 15); broadcast communication signals (section 21); and sound recordings such as records, cassettes and CDs (section 18).

Protection under copyright laws is automatic in Canada: as soon as an original work has been written down, recorded or entered as a computer file, it is immediately copyright-protected. A certificate of registration of copyright is also recommended, as evidence that the copyright is registered to the owner (section 53 (2)). International treaties also protect Canadian copyrights in most foreign countries.

In Canada, copyright protects intellectual property rather than physical property: the text of a novel or a song, rather than the actual book or paper it’s printed on. Copyright entitlement legally ends at a certain point: generally, it endures for the lifetime of the creator, the remainder of the calendar year in which the creator dies, and for 50 years after the end of that calendar year.

However, under its "fair dealing" provisions, the Copyright Act does allow individuals or organizations to use original works without such use being considered an infringement: criticism and review, news reporting, and private study or research (section 29). The Act also exempts certain categories of users, such as non-profit educational institutions (section 29.4).

As well, the Copyright Act empowers the Copyright Board of Canada, an economic regulatory body that establishes the royalties to be paid for the use of copyrighted works (section 66). The Board has the right to supervise agreements between users and licensing bodies, and issue licences when the copyright owner cannot be located.

The administration of such copyrights is entrusted to a collective administrative society (section 67). A collective society is an organization that administers the rights of several copyright owners, grants permission to use their works, and sets conditions. Collective administration is widespread in Canada, particularly for the rights to musical performances, reprography rights and mechanical reproduction.

Other government organizations are also involved in the administration of copyright. The Copyright Policy Branch, in the department of Canadian Heritage, works with the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate of Industry Canada. It liaises with stakeholders and interest group to keep copyright policies up to date — addressing, for instance, new developments in technology, such as the Internet.

The law of copyright also applies to the Internet, and so most individual works found there are protected: using Internet text or graphics without the permission of the copyright holder, for instance, is an infringement of copyright law.

General Rules of Copyright

Session 4: Self Check and Assignment

In this section of the lesson, students will check their understanding of what they have already learned by completing the session 4 Career Choice Assignment.

In this section, students had an opportunity to examine different career options in the graphic industry and look at copyright laws in Canada and how they apply to them.

Before continuing on, please review the lesson objectives that were presented to you at the beginning of the lesson. If you have any questions, please contact your teacher before moving on.

By the end of Session 4: "Careers and Copyright", students should be able to:

• make personal connections to the cluster content and processes to inform possible pathway choices

• identify copyright restrictions and permissions and put them into practice