Social Networking Sites & Copyright Violations Or ‘Hey Wait A Minute… That’s Mine! (Winter 2008/09)

by Pattie Stone, Principal, pattiedesign (multimedia designers)

In an age where social networking sites are blossoming like flowers in Spring time, questions about how to protect yourself against copyright violations are popping up just as quickly.  'Copyright infringement' (or copyright violation) is the unauthorized use of material that is covered by copyright law, in a manner that violates one of the copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works (From Wikipedia).

Copyright law is very complex and ever changing, but some common examples of web copyright infringement are using and/or allowing the download of any music, video, software, papers or journals, photographs, graphics that you have not produced yourself or obtained permission from the author/producer to use and/or distribute.

I asked expert, Paul Burani, of Clicksharp Marketing, www.clicksharpmarketing.com, about the realities & frequency of identity theft and copyright violation on social media sites and how to avoid them. Here’s some great information and advice from Paul:

“High profile publishers are finally seeing copyright infringement become a major point of contention in social media discussions.  The best example is Viacom, which sued Google in 2007 for $1 billion over ‘massive copyright infringement,’ claiming that users were posting copyrighted material on YouTube’s site.  Some less-trafficked sites continue to operate under the radar, but there’s a general feeling that they’ll get whipped into shape over time.  Nonetheless, for a smaller organization without the legal resources to take such legal action, a good strategy is to acknowledge that content and identity theft will always exist to some degree, and simply publish content first on their own domain. Search engines are getting smarter about separating original ‘canonical’ sources of content from copies that are ‘scraped’ from the source for re-use on blogs and other social media.  Once the publisher verifies that the original copy has been indexed, they can be confident that they will retain credit for their work.”

Bottom line: If you want to retain some control over your copyrighted material, simply publish the content first on your domain and website and be mindful that whatever you publish elsewhere runs the risk of copyright violation. Remember, only you can control what you put online. You cannot control what others do with your information.