Our bachelor’s thesis’ practical part is a 30-minute documentary film about former Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is called Luopuneet – Tarinoita vartiotornin varjosta. The aim of this paper is to find solutions to the problems we encountered while making the documentary. These rather subjective problems relate to public peace and copyright. We also wanted to research whether the law and practice always go hand in hand when working as a journalist. The aim was to find out if the industry conceals contradictory rules of thumb, for instance practices related to copyrights or public peace that are not entirely in harmony with the law or which leave room for legal interpretation.

Our material consists of inteviews of four Finnish documentary film makers. We also utilized the Guidelines for Journalists, decisions of the Council for Mass Media in Finland and literature related to topic. Material from interviews and literature was applied for deliberating the problems that we encountered while making our documentary film and finding solutions for them. The matteres were pondered from the aspects of law, ethics and practice.

We came across a solution or at least a solution closely resembling the truth to most of our questions. Some questions remained unsolved, though. We could not clearly point out for instance whether a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses is a public place or not. It was also surprising to notice that policies relating to copyright can be very undefined and variable in the media industry. Nor could we find unambiguous guidelines for interviewing minors.

Although this paper discusses cases that are clearly defined and related to a religious subject we believe that it can be of use to others pondering over questions about public peace and copyright.