Social Media and Copyright
Social Media is everywhere and with the newest phones and other technology, everyone is a photographer! We know everybody’s opinions from tweets and blogs. Businesses are connecting with their customers through social media and it has opened a new world of ads. Social media promotes visuals, funny content, whatever they can do to capture your attention for one second longer, because a great visual leads to more views and consuming your attention which leads to their profits.
A lot of people are trying to become an influencer, or gain popularity through social media, by posting some original content. Content creators make money through Instagram and YouTube, by having followers and promoting a product through ads, meaning they get paid to grab more of your attention! Sometimes content creators/ influencers help each other by re-posting each other’s materials. However, there is an issue with re-posting someone else’s photos, retweeting and re-blogging! Even if credit is given, were you given permission to begin with?
“Look at this funny image on this random cat I found on the internet! I must share it with everyone!” -RE-POST-
I love a good cat meme as much as the next person, but I don’t own a cat. Memes tend to be quick and painless in general because people post them for the intention to make the world laugh for free. Some people tend to not be worried about copyright and people sharing or re-posting and it’s great. But it doesn’t mean everybody is happy with their work taking off and running wild in the internet with no attribution.
Issue with Copyright and Re-posting
Let’s cover the basics, a copyright under US and EU law is a form of protection that gives “original works of authorship.”
So many people may have worked really hard to take the perfect picture and the world of copyright laws are slow to protect them. Theoretically, copyright is created when the photographer snaps the shot. Yet to prove it is actually them who took the shot could be a problem, especially when they want to sell it. Photographers and musicians and other creatives have faced this issue for a while, and going through the legal hassle can be quite a headache.
Imagine a photographer, Luis, who spends weeks searching for a specific animal, like a wolf pack in Yellowstone. Finally finds some, snaps the perfect shot. He protects it by watermarking and tries to sell the photo to a magazine, to then have it be screenshotted, uploaded and re-posted by the internet community. Weeks of work down the drain, what a shame. There is a vast array of information being uploaded every minute and re-posting others photos can become problematic.
Most people re-post pictures, and don’t even think about copyright laws and the law is being discussed by world governments but to no avail. Some people do give credit to the original creator, which is nice, but again PERMISSION!
The only safe and respectable way is to solely post your original creations, but most people wouldn’t do that, and if they did what would happen to all the memes?!
Marketing and ads
As for businesses, they are trying to find potential customers through the billions of active users on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and many more. Reaching masses with a click of a button, ads have never been made easier! But as so much content is being produced, so rapidly, copyright and intellectual property is becoming more of an issue. Professional photographers and music creators are worried about their material being stolen and re-adapted. Even with today’s version of copyright, can tweets, posts, original photos really be protected? “Possibly”, there are startups working on this issue, such as Kelp Digital.
As it stands now, tweets and posts can be semi-protected through copyright but it is not generally enforceable. Photos are theoretically protected by copyright the second it is taken, but then what? You post it anywhere and it automatically gets re-posted, you can not post it and try selling it through your own website, but a simple “copy image” or screenshot will negate that.
Giving credit to the original creator when re-posting without their permission doesn’t avert copyright infringement, it actually could make matters worse, because now more and more people have started to share it. Everybody seems to ignore the idea that the holder of the copyright has exclusive rights to publish their own work.
The other issue is that some original creators don’t care and just want the credit and want their material shared as much as possible as it increases their exposure and reputation while other original creators want to be paid for their work more through the “traditional” sense. Clearly, with the internet and new technologies, there has been a shift in the business paradigm for photographers.
Government involvement
Social media platforms protect themselves and shift all liability to their users when they create an account and accept their terms and conditions. Typically it ascertains that the user has the rights to the content which they are posting and therefore the liability of any infringement claim as well. So if someone wants to press legal charges, it is to the individual rather than the social media platform. Social media users and professionals need to understand the concerns of posting unoriginal content and governments need to find different ways to tackle these issues. This may be changing soon, such as with the new EU Copyright directive, it will also give responsibility to the platforms, but we will have to see some of the first legal cases to make a better assessment.
Social media companies are facing ever more scrutiny in the eyes of the law, and not solely for copyright, but because of data sensitivity and lack of privacy as well. Governments are discussing it at length and the EU and the US have both recently spoken to the heads of major tech corporations, in some cases giving them “hefty fines” of billions of dollars, -pennies for a trillion dollar company-.
As for copyright itself, the law is developing and for having a platform that enables copyright infringement with ease, they may soon be accountable for the actions of their users. Businesses tend to love re-posts as it is free advertising! If we really think about it, the internet itself is still in its childhood stage, with social media only being around for maybe 15 years. Government as usual is slower to respond to the fast changes in this paradigm shift. Recently, the EU has mentioned that every state must implement their Copyright Directive by June 2021. At least governments are recognizing a dilemma, but that is just the beginning; the only way to combat this issue is for more democratic governments to come together and decide what is the best way forward, and what regulations they need to put into place.
Business and free market reign have many perks, but just as governments have put regulation on many other sectors, we may need regulation on the tech sector as well. In the meantime, while governments figure out their side of things, the private sector can boast new companies that also combat this issue. Governments, companies and individuals will need to work together to come up with a solution that will make this field fair for all the players involved. That is going to be tricky. Too strict regulation or inadequate measures will not just kill off the business but put in jeopardy our basic human rights, such as freedom of expression. Too little regulation is likely to result in exploiting of the less protected groups as is currently happening with the creators of original content. The delicate balance is somewhere in between.
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