AF7430 Law, and Film, Television and New Media

How AF7430 is assessed

The four components published in the first lecture's housekeeping notes total 100%, and the slide deck for the same session repeats all four figures. Two points need care. First, two published statements of the essay do not agree: the first lecture gives it as two thousand words, while the term-essay instruction sheet, which is the document governing the task, gives a range of not less than 1,800 and not more than 2,200 words excluding references and footnotes; the same pair of documents also differ on the spoken presentation, described as three to five minutes in the early notes and as an eight-minute session capped at four minutes of presentation in the instruction sheet. This guide follows the instruction sheet and shows both readings.

Second, two rules sit outside the weighted table and can cost more than any of it: late submission of the essay will not be admitted, and plagiarism is stated to result in failure of the course. The word hurdle does not appear anywhere in the course materials, and no attendance threshold is stated, so confirm on Moodle whether anything beyond the four weighted components bears on whether you pass, along with the current deadlines and submission settings.

Current AF7430 dates

Dates are as published in Both dates come from the assessment instructions published for this offering; confirm the current dates on Moodle.. Confirm exact deadlines and submission settings in the live LMS.

What AF7430 covers

Eleven chapters follow the taught sequence from the basic legal furniture a producer needs, through contract, copyright and the other intellectual property rights, into defamation, privacy and clearance, and out to television licensing, film censorship and the streaming platforms.

What it trains instead is a skill of recognition. A production decision, who to hire, what to adapt, where to shoot, whose logo is in frame, what to leave in the cut, creates a legal exposure at the moment it is taken, and the cost of noticing it at that moment rather than at delivery is the difference between an email and a re-edit.

Every assessed component puts a production situation in front of you and asks what follows legally: a draft contract to pull apart in a group, an essay problem with four or five buried issues, four minutes to say out loud what the real problem is.

Law and the Screen Industry

The opening chapter installs the vocabulary everything else stands on, and it is worth reading slowly because most plausible-sounding wrong answers have one of these terms doing a job it cannot do.

Statute is written legislation that everyone must follow; common law is the body of principle built by judges, held together by the practice of standing by things decided so that a court is bound by earlier decisions of courts at or above its level.

Criminal law concerns conduct a government disapproves of and seeks to control; civil law governs relationships between citizens and legal entities, and the standards of proof differ, on the balance of probabilities in a civil case and beyond reasonable doubt in a criminal one.

The chapter also fixes who exists legally, from the limited company whose members risk only their capital, through partnerships and sole proprietorships, down to the minor and the mentally incapacitated person who cannot contract or litigate at all.

It closes on two distinctions a producer meets weekly: employee against contractor, decided by how the work is actually done rather than by the title on the document, and the pair of clauses at the back of every agreement that choose the court, the governing law and whether the dispute goes to litigation or to arbitration.

Contract Law Essentials for Screen Deals

A contract is an agreement creating obligations that the law will enforce or recognise, and the chapter works through the four questions that decide whether you have one, in the order that disposes of a problem.

Was there an offer rather than an invitation to treat, tested objectively by whether the words or conduct could induce a reasonable person to believe there was an intention to be bound. Was the acceptance final, unqualified and actually communicated, because silence cannot be converted into agreement by the offeror drafting that it will be.

Are the terms certain enough to be given meaning, since a service of reasonable standard or subject to the director's satisfaction is not a term at all unless custom or trade usage supplies the content.

Did each side give something of value, remembering that consideration need not be adequate but that past consideration and the performance of an existing duty are not good consideration.

The chapter then turns to the four ways a properly made deal comes apart, misrepresentation, duress and undue influence, illegality and frustration, and to the line of entertainment cases on contracts in restraint of trade, where courts have enforced an exclusive tie against one performer, refused to do so against a group who had lost confidence in their manager, and struck down entirely an agreement binding an unknown writer for years to publishers who promised nothing.

Copyright in Screen Works

Copyright protects the form of expression and never the underlying idea, and it exists only in the categories the ordinance lists.

Originality is a low threshold: the work must not be copied, and a more than trivial quantity of skill, labour and judgement must have gone into it. The chapter's real work is ownership and duration.

First ownership differs by category, with the creator owning literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, the producer owning a sound recording, and a film owned jointly by the producer and the principal director unless they are the same person.

Two statutory gates move that: anything an employee produces while doing the job belongs to the employer, and a commissioned work passes to the commissioner only where the agreement expressly provides for entitlement.

Where it does not, the commissioner holds an exclusive licence to exploit it for every purpose the author could reasonably have had in mind, which is a great deal less than ownership and is discovered at exactly the moment a distributor asks to see the chain of title.

Duration is where careless answers lose decades: the general term is the life of the creator plus fifty years, but a film runs for fifty years from the death of whichever of four named contributors survives longest: the principal director, whoever wrote the screenplay, whoever wrote the dialogue, and whoever composed music written specially for the film.

Moral rights, which cannot be assigned, and the permitted acts of fair dealing and incidental inclusion complete the chapter.

Trade Marks, Passing Off and the Right of Publicity

Nothing in this chapter behaves like copyright.

A patent and a trade mark have to be applied for; passing off grows only out of actual trading and is filed nowhere; the right of publicity is primarily an overseas concept with a local substitute that has to be argued in passing off instead.

A trade mark is any sign capable of distinguishing one undertaking's goods or services from another's and of being represented graphically, which is wide enough to include colours, sounds, smells and the shape of packaging, and registration proceeds class by class across forty-five classes.

Protection is territorial, which is why the comparative disputes the course teaches all turn on who filed first in which registry and what local recognition existed at that date rather than on who is more famous.

Passing off requires goodwill recognised as specifically distinctive, a misrepresentation that need not be intentional, and damage satisfied by a real business possibility rather than a mere fear of loss.

The liability chapters, and the clearance work that prevents them

Artistic freedom is not absolute and never was, and work that is obscene, defamatory or incites illegal acts falls outside it.

The defamation chapters build the elements and the three defences of justification, fair comment and privilege, then set out the six moves available to a production based on a real life, in descending order of reliability, and trace the standard fictional-persons disclaimer back to the 1930s action that produced it.

The privacy chapter separates two questions that look like one: whether you need permission to be where you are filming, which is usually answered by published guidance and a short list of exceptions, and whether the person you captured had a reasonable expectation of privacy, which can survive in a public place when the activity itself is private.

Breach of confidence sits alongside, binding people who signed nothing, and is the reason a pitched format idea can be protected where copyright protects nothing.

The contract-review chapter then turns all of it into instruments: an eleven-head checklist for a production agreement and three clearance checklists for the finished programme.

The regulators, and the platforms

The last three chapters move from private law to public control.

Television licensing sorts every service by two tests, whether it primarily targets Hong Kong and whether it reaches more than five thousand specified premises, and the four resulting categories carry sharply different obligations and are granted by different authorities.

Film censorship runs a statutory route from submission to exhibition with three separate entrances to a Board of Review, and one provision added in 2021 that closes all three on a single ground.

The final chapter takes the long view: every storage format that frightened the industry was litigated, the recorder the studios tried to stop became a revenue line, and the fights over who owns a fictional character run for decades because a character is a bundle of rights sold at different times under documents written for markets that no longer exist.

Who owns the script, and who may be sued for the scene

Key terms

Invitation to Treat

An indication that a party is willing to receive offers rather than an offer itself. An advertisement of goods at a price is normally one, which is why turning up with the money does not create a contract the shop has broken.

Consideration

Something of value given in exchange for a promise, without which the promise is not enforceable as a contract. It need not be adequate, but past consideration and the performance of an existing duty do not count.

Deed

An instrument that performs an act rather than promising one, and the form used where a promise is made without consideration. It must be in writing, must say on its face that a deed is intended, must be signed and must be delivered.

Commissioned Work

A work made on the commission of another person. Copyright passes to the commissioner only where the agreement expressly provides for entitlement; otherwise the author keeps it and the commissioner holds an exclusive licence.

Moral Rights

The rights to be identified as author or director, to object to derogatory treatment of the work, and not to be falsely attributed as author. They cannot be transferred or assigned.

Fair Dealing

A defence permitting use of a protected work for criticism or review, for research or private study, or for reporting current events. The first and third require sufficient acknowledgement of the source.

Passing Off

A remedy available without registration where a trader markets goods or services as connected with another's. It requires goodwill recognised as distinctive, a misrepresentation, and damage.

Justification

The defamation defence that the statement complained of is true. It requires evidence adequate to prove the allegation, so belief or hearsay will not support it.

Breach of Confidence

A claim arising where information confidential in itself is imparted on an occasion of confidence and then used without authority to the claimant's detriment. It applies with or without a contract.

AF7430 FAQ

How to prepare for the assessments

Invent one modest production and carry it through every chapter: a sixty-minute drama, two writers, one director, a novel it is adapted from, a broadcaster paying for it. Answer each chapter's question about that project before reading the chapter's own answer.

Then practise the move the assessment rewards: write the issue as a question with two possible answers, name the ordinance or the decided case that decides between them, and apply it to the facts in three sentences. Three sentences of that beats a page of doctrine with no question in front of it, and it is also exactly the length of a four-minute spoken answer.

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