Social Media and Intellectual Property

Social media and networking has now become an integral part of everyday life. Forming a new form of social interaction and communication social platforms have become a great way for many organisations and companies to generate business and engage with their audience. Recent statistics have shown that over 1 billion people are now active Facebook users, Instagram boasts over 500 million daily active users and over 300 million monthly users for social platform Twitter. Using these various social channels available present many benefits however, it does not come without problems which affect Intellectual Property (IP) rights.

Facebook Transparency Report

Released in December, this report indicates for the first half of 2017 just how much IP has been affected by social media. As one of the biggest user-generated online platforms the report revealed that in the first half of 2017 they received 377,000 complaints in relation to IP issues and removed nearly 3million posts due to complaints regarding copyright, counterfeiting and trademark infringement. The findings show that from January to June 2017 Facebook received 224,464 copyright reports, 41,854 Trademark reports and 14,279 counterfeit reports.

Similarly, Instagram owned by Facebook presents some high figures regarding IP complaints. 70,008 reports were made regarding counterfeit, 16,563 for trademarks and 10,231 for counterfeit.

Remaining committed to rights holders

This is the first time Facebook has collected and released such data, so it will be interesting to compare figures once their next report is released. Facebook Deputy General Counsel Chris Sonderby believes it is a positive step and stated:

            “We believe that sharing information about IP reports we receive from rights holders is an important step toward being more open and clear about how we protect the people and business that use our services.”