(Newswire.net — November 30, 2019) — In the “golden” age of the internet and the expansion of online media, establishing legal protection for copyright works requires a complicated process and can be expensive.
Indeed, it often happens that you have interesting or even important news, but that you do not have (the rights to) an adequate photo or video, which brings you to three options: To abuse someone’s work, which is punishable by law (but it still happens anyway), to post nothing at all or…
… to manage your knowledge and skills within the frameworks that are available.
The temptation came this week from colleagues from the Bosnian Federal Television, who, while preparing their sports program, did not have all the necessary “covers” to feature the tennis matches of the WTA tours.
While, we suppose, it was possible to find footage from the matches of Carolina Pliskova and Elina Svitolina on the television program exchange platforms, the footage from the matches of Bianca Andreska and Simone Halep were missing. So colleagues from Sarajevo have come to an idea – a video game!
They used a PS4 video game to play the match and recorded footage for further edit. And it must be admitted that the work was done meticulously and professionally. They managed to recreate some won points from the real match and the video editor got a really needed shot of the match.
Given that there are many sports video games with supreme graphic animations so close to reality, it is no surprise that journalists from Federal TV used a video game to solve their problem of lacking footage. However, war video games are used more than sports ones to portray real life events, which is alarming.
A tribute to Russia’s armed forces on the country’s flagship news program “mistakenly” used footage from the Arma-3 tactical computer game to illustrate military action in Syria, BBC reports.
Viewers of the weekly Voskresnoye Vremya programe on state-run Channel One TV noticed that gun-sight footage of a truck being attacked is actually video game footage and mocked the TV network.
The Ireland’s TV (ITV) “mistakenly included” video game footage in an investigative documentary “Exposure”, which at the time was labeled as IRA footage showing a helicopter being shot down by weapons allegedly supplied by Qaddafi, Journalism.co.uk reported.
“The events featured in Exposure: Qaddafi and the IRA were genuine but it would appear that during the editing process the correct clip of the 1988 incident was not selected and other footage was mistakenly included in the film by producers,” an ITV spokesman said.
We are close to complete foto-realistic graphics in video games that would be impossible to distinguish from real life events. We can expect in the near future that more TV stations will use fake footage to portray real life events. However, that is not the scariest part. The supreme graphic animation technology can portray events that never actually happened. Given that journalism ethics is at its lowest and that there are numerous cases that mainstream news agencies are producing fake news, we are looking at a new era of news reporting that we saw in sci-fi movies such as The Runner.
The future is now, and it ain’t pretty.