The Social Dilemma discusses the way big tech companies steal data from users. One facet of this idea is intellectual property rights. The idea of intellectual property on social media is relatively complicated. On the surface, a user’s post or image belongs to the user. However, the ease of accessibility makes this line harder to draw. One issue arose out of Facebook’s privacy policy, where the company maintains that users agree to their profile pictures and names being used for advertising purposes. From this point on, the user’s name and photo can be used unknowingly by social media companies (Blank, 2018). Copyrights are arguably one of the most important intellectual property rights in social media. Generally, media, such as photos, music and text, created by a user will belong to them. Unfortunately, this is difficult to keep track of, for many social media privacy agreements includes contracts where the company has “non-exclusive and unlimited license to a user’s material” (European IP Helpdesk, 2020). Each social media platform consists of different agreements that dictate their rights over a user’s material, but they all include various loop holes that the average consumer is unaware of. At the end of the day, most companies are able to do what they desire with a user’s original content, despite the copyright over media. Furthermore, it is easy to steal someone’s work by reposting media without providing adequate credit to the original user. Though this can be mitigated by software, it is impossible to catch every single case of copyright infringement. Whether it is through social media platforms, or other users, it is easy for people’s photos, videos and music to be used without giving credit where it is due. Copyright infringement continues to be a growing problem, but there are ways to defend intellectual property. If a user places a watermark on their material, it is much more difficult for people to use it without giving credit.
Blank, J. (2019, April 18). IP Law in the Age of Social Media. Retrieved from https://www.northeastern.edu/graduate/blog/intellectual-property-and-social-media/
Intellectual property and social media: European IP Helpdesk. (2020). Retrieved from http://www.iprhelpdesk.eu/blog/intellectual-property-and-social-media