The viral school fight: a minor, a cassette and a night drone

Three interests pull in different directions and must be reasoned separately.

1. The child's identity and dignity. A 14-year-old is a minor, is a victim of violence, and is identifiable. Indian law and broadcast practice both treat the identity of a child involved in a violent incident as protected - the juvenile justice framework restricts disclosure of a child's identity in media, and even outside any proceeding, a crying, bleeding 14-year-old has an obvious expectation of privacy that the public interest does not override. His injury is his medical information.

2. Public interest. A fight at a school and the school's response is a legitimate story. The story is the violence and the institutional failure, not the child's face.

3. Copyright and source. The student who filmed it owns the footage; the person who forwarded it on WhatsApp may not. Broadcast needs a written licence from the shooter (a minor, so through the guardian) and a logged source.

What goes to air: the story, with the face and uniform cropped or motion-blurred for the full duration - not frozen on one frame - the blood and the crying close-up removed, the name, class and any identifying street or house shot dropped, no classmates interviewed by name, and the guardian contacted before broadcast with a right of reply.

The headline goes too. 'School silent as violence spreads' asserts a pattern you have not established. The principal declining to comment is not silence about violence. Rewrite to what you can prove. Preserve the original file unedited - a police case may follow and you may become a custodian of evidence.

Copyright here is layered: the sound recording belongs to whoever produced and released the cassette, and the underlying composition and lyrics belong to the composer and lyricist. Copying the cassette into a bulletin reproduces both. The fact that the cassette is old, or that the song is traditional in origin, does not make this particular recording free - a folk melody can be traditional while a 1990s studio recording of it is fully owned.

Fair dealing for reporting current events does not stretch to a music bed under a feature. It is not criticism, review or reporting; it is synchronisation, and synchronisation needs a licence.

Ranked options:

1. Commission a local dhol and pepa player for a few thousand rupees and own the recording outright. Best outcome: cheaper than a label licence, better audio than a cassette, on-brand for a regional channel, and the channel owns a reusable asset.
2. Licence a cleared library or Creative Commons Bihu track, with the licence document saved to the file.
3. Sync-licence the original from the label, realistic if the feature is short and the use is broadcast-once.
4. Run the feature with ambient sound only - no music is a valid creative choice and always legal.

Refuse: 'we'll credit the singer' - a credit is not a licence. Also note the practical argument: a 1990s cassette carries hiss and wow that will sound worse than silence on a digital channel. Either way, log the decision on a cue sheet so a YouTube Content ID claim can be answered with paper.

Safety. A sandbank at 10 p.m. is a water hazard, an electrical hazard and a crowd hazard at the same time. The written risk assessment should cover: life jackets and a downstream spotter, no crew member working alone near the water, generator earthing and cable routing kept off wet sand with an RCD, every light stand sandbagged and assigned to one person, a barrier and one named crew member on crowd control, a fixed check-in time with the office, first aid and a charged phone, and a rule that no one is left alone at the location at wrap. Check the current and the upstream release before standing on a sandbank at night - rivers rise without warning.

Drone. A site 4 km from the airport boundary sits inside the airport's controlled airspace, which under the DGCA's drone rules is the zone immediately around an aerodrome where flights are tightly restricted and require a registered UAS, a certified remote pilot and clearance through the Digital Sky platform; closer zones need Air Traffic Control permission. Night operations add a further approval that the channel almost certainly does not hold at 10 p.m. on this notice.

Final decision:

• Cancel the drone for tonight. Fly it on a later daytime shoot with registration, pilot certificate and Digital Sky permission in hand - and check the airspace map for that specific coordinate rather than trusting the 4 km figure alone.
• Convert the 10 p.m. live to a pre-recorded piece shot at 8:30 p.m., with ground lighting and practicals instead of an aerial, so the risk is taken in daylight with the option to abandon.
• Do not put the reporter on a sandbank beside a running generator for a live shot whose only unique value was the aerial view - which you are no longer flying.