LO3: P4+P5: Report

 Be able to illustrate how the legal, ethical, social and moral issues are considered within the product proposal

My product Idea:

My product is a music app that will allow people to listen to their favourite music. Users are able to create accounts and send friend requests to people. Once they follow each other, they are able to create groups together (minimum 2 people). Within these groups friends will be able to listen to music together. It will also allow them to collaborate to create playlists and listen to them together. To locate friends to send requests they can either type the username in the search bar or they will have the option of quick add if they have the friend in their contacts. 

Legal:

One legal issue I will face when creating my product is Intellectual Property Rights. These are rights that are granted to creators and owners of works that are a result of human intellectual creativity. Since my product is a music streaming service, this links to my product since the music being streamed does not belong to me and therefor I may need permission. Also streaming services such as Spotify and Apple music are generally responsible for paying out all royalties to the publishers themselves. The streaming services also negotiate with the major labels. This is what I would have to do to be able to have access the music needed to create a successful music streaming service.

Another issue is the Data Protection Act. The Data Protection Act was updated in 2018 and ensures that personal and private data owned and held by an organisation is clear and transparent with the users as well as being secured. So in terms of my product idea, the Data Protection Act would concern the logins and usernames when the users are signing into their accounts. This would mean that I will comply with this law by including a statement explaining the uses of data that the users are giving into my product. My product will be taking information such as their name, age, preferred gender, title, and contact details for example the users' email address and phone number but the phone number will be optional to the user. By inputting their phone number into my product, it will allow them to quick add any friends from their contacts and vice versa. 

My final legal issue is the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act from 1988. This law dictates the uses and ownership of original work from the creators. It gives the rights of the work to the creators and to use their work we would need their permission. Concerning my product, I would need to gain permission from the artist's labels to be able to distribute their music within my product.

Regulation:

One of the regulation issues surrounding my product is ensuring that the explicit tracks and albums are labelled as 'explicit' accordingly. An example of this is on iTunes, if the song is not labelled as explicit when it is this can cause the song to be hidden from sale in the store. This would mean that the target audience cannot access and buy the album because if one song is explicit that means that the whole album needs to be tagged as explicit. This would affect my product because we would earn less money and so would the artist and their label. This could lead to the label pulling out their permission to use their music within my product. I will address these concerns within my product proposal by discussing the need to label all explicit music and albums and to keep an eye out for the artists which are most likely to fall into this category. 

Ethical:

When making my product I will need to ensure that the possibility for things such as trolling or cyberbullying is minimal. This ethical issue will be most likely to occur within the communication feature of the group members while messaging and sharing music. I will prevent this by banning some offensive language and adding a report button. This will allow my users to report any bullying such as racism or homophobia. This would then go onto unfriending them or blocking the other user and have the accident reviewed. This feature would interest any stakeholders because it proves we care about our users and their safety online. 

Another ethical issue is also labelling the songs explicit. This is because we do not want people who are underage to be listening to music with strong language. To address this issue within my product I will add a warning to give to the users who are under 16 when trying to interact with the music for example adding songs to a playlist. It would then further offer them a non explicit version of the song or a similar song which is not explicit. This will not happen if they are listening to music with a friend who is older because then the music would stop playing and cause the songs to become out of sync which defeats the purpose of my product. However if all users are under 16, the warning will come up and the music will pause until all users have selected to continue. This will attract stakeholders because by having alternate options proves our products intuition. 

Social:

One of the social issues concerning my product is racial identity. We do not want to discriminate and niche our audience when we would like our product to be used globally. This means we need to diversify our products by including different artists from a variety of backgrounds. By doing this all types of people will  be represented and different music genres will be included in the product. This will interest stakeholders as it shows we care about minority groups and want our users to have diverse options. 

Another social issue is gender inequality. My product will counter this by having highlighted playlists with themes of women of power or trending female artists on the rise. This will give the audience songs that aren’t necessarily from an all male perspective. This will attract stakeholders because it indicates that my product is advertising to a wider audience and therefore can gain more money. 

Moral:

A moral issue that needs to be discussed surrounding the creation of my product is piracy. Piracy is the when people violate the copyright laws and decide to download any music as it is distributed elsewhere that is not an official music store. My product will help avoid the moral issue of piracy because it will offer them another alternative way to reach the music they would like to listen to. Stakeholders will be interested in my product because of this as we are complying with the laws of Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988, and are giving credit to the original artists and their labels.