Discuss your experience at the internship related to the ethical guidelines discussed in the AIGA guide.

Internships are a great way to gain experience in the workplace. You learn about new skills and experience different situations, but one of the best things they teach you about is ethics and how they should be handled. Let’s start with the NDA(non-disclosure agreement) or confidentiality agreement as some may say, it basically means that any info form the company that’s isn’t available to the people must stay under wraps. Things like business plans/records, products, inventions, and any proprietary info. Most jobs and internships require you to sign one and if it gets broken there can be a lot of legal ramifications. Some of the ways you can be breaking NDA could be copying or modifying any info without consent, not having authorized use for that info, or yes even just discussing it to someone without permission even if they’re with the company.

The next set of guidelines that I want to talk about is copyright, I am COMD, and plus I make a lot of videos for YouTube so it’s pretty important for someone like me to learn more about it. According to the “AIGA design and Business ethics publication: guide to copyright” (page 81) “Work must be original and creative to be copyrightable. Here, “originality” simply means that the designer created the work and did not copy it from someone else.” So, something as simple as finger painting a photo of buildings can be copyrighted and could even get into legal battles if need be. For example, I once had to make a video for a client, but something bad happened I accidentally forgot to credit someone for a series of images, and it had to get taken down. Most people will do this and its good practice to protect your work just in case. But if we are ever in a situation where we need to use an image or logo, you need to understand the concept of Fair uses. At its core fair use allows someone to use someone else’s work without permission however, “it can’t compete with or injure the market for the work”, like using someone’s art to do critique videos. But in other cases, like specific source images and logos, it’s all about having to license them to form the “original design” for the right to use them properly. In short, by following these rules, it can greatly help people learn and practice their ethics for the future.