Canadian Lawyer InHouse

47 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE SEPTEMBER 2016 lease copy and paste this as your status: I declare that my rights are attached to all my per- sonal data, drawings, paintings, photos, video, texts etc. published on my profi le and my page. Those who read this text can do a copy/paste on their Facebook wall. This will allow them to place them- selves under the protection of copyright." The above message, or variations on it, started appearing on Facebook more than a year ago, and only the social media service itself could tell you how widely it circulated. Where once there were chain letters, now there are chain status updates. Of course, any lawyer will immediately recognize the disclaimer as useless, given that opting into something like Facebook puts users under a completely different set of rights and obligations. Before you laugh, though, take a good look at how copyrighted material is be- ing used on social media and it's clear even highly experienced corporate counsel might wish they could slap up a pre-emptive pro- tection notice of their own. Ever since the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other services achieved a scale and online reach unthinkable to traditional newspapers and magazines, social media has become a key means of content distribution. For a while, it looked like it was simply a matter of writing a catchy title, cutting and pasting a link back to the organization's site and waiting for the online traffi c to grow. More recently, however, the major social media players are encouraging much more sophisticated forms of user-generated con- tent that could lead to widespread copyright infringement. In many cases, they are also encouraging fi rms — and not just media entities — to go beyond linking and having their content hosted directly on their own platforms. The challenge of monitoring, managing and following up on copyright violation could take off faster than the most viral cat video. "They want to be the content providers," says David Felicissimo, general counsel at Montreal-based Valnet Inc., which pub- lishes sites such as ScreenRant and TheRi- chest.com. "We know the goal is not to let users leave Facebook, but at the same time we have to think about what that means for us as a business. We're all looking at it with a bit of hesitation." Already, Felicissimo employs a "relation- ship manager," who spends 25 per cent of her time dealing with content theft. In oth- er words, she looks at how Valnet's content gets duplicated onto other sites, whether it's an article posted to someone else's blog or one of its videos uploaded to a rogue fi rm's YouTube channel. Felicissimo said the employee in question may have to send takedown notices, reach out to the likes of Facebook for help or perform other kinds of followup more than 40 times a day. This isn't just an issue for media compa- nies, says Scott Mitchell, associate general counsel at Nissan Canada. "What used to be a part of one person's job has now grown into a full-time job, often for more than one person," he says. "Given the number of media, ensuring a consistent message is also quite challenging and requires great teamwork and communi- cation across many business functions." Here's where it gets really complicated, though: Facebook has introduced a service called "Instant Articles," whereby it strikes BY SHANE SCHICK is it Whose content anyway The evolving business models of social media are making copyright and IP protection more complex than ever before. "

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