Table of Contents:
Social media is a slippery zone when it comes to copyright infringement. Some may feel that Facebook and copyright infringement go together like two peas in a pod, especially with Facebook Marketplace scams and the recent growth of social commerce with Facebook Shops.
Fortunately, the social media giant provides an easy avenue for rights owners to pursue if they find copyright infringement on Facebook. We’ll go over exactly how to use the tool here.
Summary:
Facebook takes intellectual property rights seriously, and it makes it fairly easy to report copyright infringement. Here’s what you need to do.
If you want to report an intellectual property infringement, start by visiting Facebook’s online copyright report form here. You can choose either copyright or trademark infringement. Only the intellectual property rights owner or legal representative is allowed to report a violation.
This step exists to make sure only real infringement claims are filed here. Notice that the last two options deal with rights violations, while the others are about other problems like hacked and fake accounts. If you select any of these other options, it will lead you to the corresponding page in Facebook’s Help Center.
This step is pretty basic. Just enter your contact info and specify whether you or your client owns the IP. Also, note that your email will be shared with the infringing party, so you might want to use a generic business email account to report copyright infringement on Facebook.
In this next step, you’ll paste the infringing URL(s) and say whether it’s an ad, post, or album. You can also select the reason for making the Facebook intellectual property infringement claim.
Facebook’s reporting tool works best when you can save and submit exact URLs. If you don’t have one, Facebook will give you a little lesson on how to locate the URL for a webpage and warn you that the claim tool might not work without one.
The last step in the process of reporting copyright infringement on Facebook is to provide URLs or attachments of authorized examples of your work. In the attachments section, you can upload other documents like certificates and licenses but you aren’t required to do so.
After that, agree to the statement of declaration and submit your claim.
After you submit a copyright report form on Facebook, it will review the case. If you’ve provided good evidence, Facebook will simply remove the offending link, photo, or video from the site.
Next, the alleged infringer is able to submit an appeal under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) or contact you directly to submit a counter-notice. It’s not clear if the recipient has a certain number of days in which to counter.
If you are forwarded a DMCA appeal, you have 10 to 14 business days to file a court action against the alleged infringer. If you don’t respond in that timeframe with a filing, Facebook can reinstate the content you had reported.
If snail mail is your thing, you can contact Facebook’s DMCA-designated agent at the address below:
If you choose to go this route, you need to create a copyright report form on Facebook, which includes the following information:
According to Facebook’s terms, users are only allowed to post content that doesn’t violate the IP rights of someone else. Of course, many people share photos, videos, and quotes all day long. Copyright law allows for fair use of material, which permits quotation, review, parody, and criticism. The bottom line is that Facebook allows rights holders to claim copyright infringement, and the website takes these claims seriously.
As you can see, reporting a copyright infringement on Facebook is very simple. The not-so-simple thing is to stay on top of all possible infringements on social media. Since it’s so easy to create accounts, counterfeiters can use a profile until it’s taken down and then pop up somewhere else. To combat this, Red Points’ Anti Piracy software can use machine learning and AI to constantly scan social media platforms in search of copyright infringement. Then you can review possible infringements and select which ones to file claims on. Find out how the tech works here.
In this article Red Points takes a look at the scams that litter Facebook Marketplace,…
Counterfeiters’ presence on social media is difficult to deny, and their presence seems to be…
This article will show you how to find infringement on your product, and how to…
