Gift Focus inc Attire Accessories - May/June 2020

50 Copyright and social media – the lowdown Dids Macdonald, CEO of Anti Copying in Design (ACID), looks at social media copyright, and what you need to do. The ACID team recently attended a great webinar by Dr. Hayleigh Bosher – here is a summary together with some tips and advice we gleaned to share with readers; the full version is available through 4IP Council. The social media landscape – how it’s used Social media is a relatively new phenomenon; however, we’ve seen significant change across its short lifespan. Whilst we, the users, see the purpose of social media platforms as sharing information and user-generated content with a global reach, platform founders are reaping immense profits from ad-based revenue. Platforms like Twitter can generate upwards of $3.46 billion annually by showing you the products and services of other companies and organisations. And by encouraging you to share more, and engage more, through these platforms, they in turn boost their revenue, in Twitter’s case by an increase of 60%, year on year. With 45% of the world’s population using social media, spending an average of 136 minutes per day on social networks, this kind of income level is unsurprising. Platform responsibility – are service providers doing enough to protect users? The Intellectual Property Office published a report in 2017 identifying the array of counterfeiting activity which goes on online. The ‘Share and Share Alike’ report identified website impersonation (cloning brand web pages), fan pages (creating fake business pages on Facebook), social media pages transacting business, promotion and the proliferation of websites selling counterfeits and offering fake special offers, in most of which social media plays a substantial, and increasing, role. Evidence from Trading Standards also indicates that the second most common locale for counterfeit investigations was indeed social media platforms. Copyright – are originators protected enough? Copyright has a length of term of 70 years plus the life of the originator and covers literary and artistic works, including photographs, videos and films, giving the rights holder exclusivity in sharing, distributing and publishing the works and the right to stop others doing the same. This territorial law, which can vary by location, presents us with a challenge when using the globally reaching internet. The purpose of copyright is to encourage