With the increasing growth of social media, it has become even more important for businesses to protect their intellectual property (IP) and look to address all such violations of IP and other rights that take place on vaired portals such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The internet now allows for sharing of content on a worldwide basis within minutes, so what was once yours and within your own ownership, could tomorrow go viral and be shared internationally without your permission / credits.
Copyright and Trademarks.
Even for companies that acquire legal ownership of logos, names and business phrases, they need to make sure that the sectors for which they have secured exclusivity, their content is not being used elsewhere on websites, tweets, updates, videos and many other internet / social channels. Is is useful to regulary check for your content online and on social media platforms and collate evidence if anything suspicious is found.
Music / Video Footage / Audio.
Just like social media, YouTube alone is now more or less impossible to track down and view all it’s content, even if you have a team of 1,000 members of staff watching 24/7 – So once again, you need to secure your IP by regulary searching for relating content to what you see as third parties using your content to promote themselves for financial gains. Most videos will only ever receive minimal exposure, so lesser cases may not be worth the hassle to enforce legal action, but video platforms such as YouTube now make it easier to report usage of third party content and a simply click of a button can alert them to unlawful usage of video / audio / music content. Make sure, if you have videos done by film production companies that you obtain intellectural ownership of not only the final edit, but also all other filmed content within your assignment you paid for.
Blogs.
Blogs are in most cases very limited to how much exposure they receive. It is very hard to discover blogs that are copy / pasted directly from another party, but once again, collating of evidence is vital to take legal action. Decide if the person / company who appears to be directly copying content is simply using your work and populating their website / channel. Evidence is key to take legal action and it is advisable to have third parties witnessing the content and copying actions incase the decision is taken to court.
Images.
These can be easier to track and to initiate legal action against and there are varied web solutions that allows for tagging of images and alert notices when your images are used elsewhere across the internet. If you simply use images from search engines such as Google with out gaining owners permission then you could receive a cease and desist letter and possibly even a claim for financial damages.
Social Media.
As with all the above, research your IP across the internet and monitor anything suspicious or close to your own IP content which may seem to be the case of another party / business looking to pass off as yourselves for financial gain. You have rights to enforce your IP ownership across Social Media platforms within the sectors which you are protecting so once again, collect relevant evidence from group / page names to content such as posts and tweets.