Social media is a platform where people can easily communicate with others quickly and creatively. You can share your thoughts and ideas with emoticons. You can post photos you just took with your phone on the social media platform like facebook Google+, Instagram twitter and many more. You can even find images across the web and share them with your friends to express how you’re feeling at any given moment.
With instant access to just about any image ever uploaded to the web, it seems harmless to pass around images. Easy access to images makes it seem like all content on the web should be free to use. But the majority of images uploaded to the web are copyrighted and if you use them you may get into a lot of trouble.
Social media is entirely made for content distribution
Social media is all about sharing the content, we might be wondering how it can exist without violating copyright laws. To give the simple of this question is that when you signed up to use their services, you agreed to a set of terms and conditions that granted them rights to redistribute your content to other users. This written form of this type of agreement is hidden in the set of term and condition because we don’t read the whole content write in it.
There’s nothing to be concerned about. The whole point of using Facebook and Twitter is to have your content distributed to other users. So these terms of use are basically the way social media companies protect themselves legally.
While you have the right to share other people’s content within the same platform, you don’t have the right to take it and use it elsewhere. If you’re doing this for your business, you may end up in a huge lawsuit, like this one.
Social Media Issues with copyright
The copyright gives you the protection over the expression of ideas, not the idea itself. It protects one kind of intellectual property of the owner.
Consider an example, the writer and bloggers must be aware of that what they write, to avoid copyright, trademark, and libel issues. For make sure before using an image from the internet you need to be sure to get a license or find public domain images.
Protect yourself and be smart
Because habits can sometimes be difficult to break, having a well-documented plan for how your marketing team will use social media can help mitigate the risk of being sued and keep your IP assets protected. And being diligent about your use of other people’s images just may save your company an expensive trip to court (and save your job).
Protecting Your Own Content on Social Media
The best way to protect your intellectual property content from being appropriated on social media is to not put it up there in the first place.
you own the content you post on one of these social media sites, you have granted a license to the media site to use the content and for others to view it.
To protect your content, include a copyright statement on the file for photos. Always be aware that your property might get appropriated by someone (not associated with the social media site). You must be vigilant to keep track of possible violations and be quick to file complaints. If you are not vigilant, you may not be able to support your claims in a lawsuit.
To protect your content as much as you can, be sure to do watermarked copyright symbols on content such as professional photos and slide presentations. You can also mark all written content that has a copyright with the copyright symbol when you post it. Taking this step will hopefully dissuade your IP recipients and third parties from infringing on your rights.
Social media and business
Social media plays the most important and powerful role in the way we do business today. Businesses can grow their business quickly with the help of social media tools, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Pinterest, Instagram, and others. These are a great marketing and publicity tool for a small business, startup, and well-established company and also for interact people very easily. With the help of social media, companies can immediately connect with their customers and clients and take review and feedback of their products. There are many benefits to social media; it opens the doors to infringement of your trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights, and privacy rights.
