Social media presents several intellectual property risks including trademark infringement and copyright violation. For example, a company's trademarks could be used without authorization on social media profiles or usernames. Additionally, sharing of media like videos or music clips without permission can infringe copyright. The document also discusses issues like trademark protection of business names and customer lists, as well as risks of trade secrets being disclosed on social media. It recommends measures like monitoring social media sites, reserving company names, and developing an enforcement strategy to help address IP risks.

1. IP ISSUES IN SOCIAL
MEDIA
Divya Raman
Corporate Department
Altacit Global
Email: info@altacit.com Website: www.altacit.com

2. Social Media
• Use of web-based and mobile
technologies to turn communication
into an interactive dialogue.
• Media for social interaction, as a
superset beyond social
communication.
• Eg:
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube
etc.

3. Impact of social media
•Anti-government protesters in Tunisia
and Egypt used Twitter, Facebook and
other platforms to run rings around
attempts at censorship and organize
demonstrations that ousted presidents
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni
Mubarak.

4. Impact of social media (contd…)
• US has also seen seen some modest
signs of social media-organized
protest, with hundreds of protesters
occupying Wall Street in anger at
perceived excesses by its banks.

5. Intellectual Property
• Patent.
• Design.
• Copyright.
• Geographical Indications.
• Trademark.

6. IP Issues in Social Media
Social networking sites present several
risks, including trademark infringement
and copyright violation issues. For
example, a company's valuable trademarks
could appear without authorization on a
user's profile page or as part of a user
name ("name squatting") on a social
networking site.

7. Copyright
•Some social media websites claim copyright
over all items posted on its website.
•While others recognize that the copyright
remains with the owner.
•File sharing is one of the aspect in
infringement of copyright through social
website. Eg: sharing video clips of
movies, music, books being shared. All this
has posed copyright infringement through
social media.

8. Trademark
•Trademark can potentially be used to
protect competitors from selling goods or
services with confusingly similar marks.
•Scrabulous: Developed by two commerce
graduates in India – game application in
facebook. Features of this game is similar to
scrabble owned by Hasbro in Canada – only
difference is scrabulous is in electronic
format. Founders of scrabulous sued and
they withdrew the game from facebook.

9. Trade Secret
Social media can put at risk a company’s trade
secrets. Since the sine qua non of a trade secret is
that it is kept secret, the speed and ease in which
information can be rapidly (and permanently)
distributed with a click of a button in social media
and internet poses a clear risk for any company
seeking to maintain a trade secret. A simple posting
of a company’s secret information can destroy the
secret and leave that information to be available to
anyone.

10. Customer List - Trade Secret
Consider, for a second, a company that considers
its customer list to be a trade secret and seeks to
protect such information. A salesperson who
identifies those customers as “friends” on
Facebook, or “connections” on LinkedIn, or some
other similar status on another social media
website, could destroy the secret nature of such a
list. It also can lead to that salesperson, in
essence, appropriating that information should
he or she leave to go to work for a competitor.

11. Case Laws
One recently reported high-profile case involved Tony
La Russa, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball
team, whose identity was hijacked on Twitter by an
imposter. The suit filed in the Superior Court of
California in San Francisco, which has since been
dismissed, claimed that someone created an account
under La Russa's name and posted tweets, giving the
false impression that the comments came from La
Russa. The suit also said that the comments were
"derogatory and demeaning" and thus damaged La
Russa's trademark rights.

12. There also have been reports of corporate
sabotage. For example, it was reported that
a public relations firm allegedly set up a
Twitter account in the name of a rival firm.
The firm then allegedly disseminated
malicious tweets for two months before the
competing firm realized that its identity had
been hijacked.

13. Protective Measures
•Companies can initiate a self-monitoring
program which include a weekly or monthly
review of a number of available social media
web sites.
•Companies may decide to hire an outside
service provider to monitor for negative
comments and infringements in the social
media websites.

14. Conclusion
Social networking sites can present difficult
enforcement and liability issues, but with
appropriate preventative measures, consistent
monitoring and carefully designed
enforcement priorities and actions, companies
can "confirm" social networking sites and their
users as friends with few reservations.

15. To minimize the risks of trademark
hijacking, trademark infringement and damage to
brand reputation that may occur on social media
networking sites, it is advisable to take
precautionary and proactive steps. Those steps
include reserving company names and key
permutations of company names with social
networking sites, developing a presence in social
networking communities, assigning company
employees who are responsible for overseeing the
monitoring process, understanding terms of use for
each of the major social networks and developing
consistent enforcement procedures.

16. THANK YOU