Remember to protect yourself when sharing others’ content
I wish I could tell you that you can flat out recycle everybody’s content without any legal problems. Of course, if I were to say that to you, I would be lying. I would be putting you in harm’s way. Don’t do that!
If you are going to be curating tried and proven viral content, you have to protect yourself legally. How do you do this?
The power CTTO
What does CTTO stand for? It stands for ‘credit to the owner.’ When you post this, you are saying to the world that you don’t own the content and that you are attributing ownership to the person who actually owns the content. Now, understand that when people post CTTO, they don’t just do it in passing.
The ones who do this right will link to the source. For example, if you are posting a funny cat video and it turns out that it was a video originally made popular by a person with a personal account, include their personal account link in your curated post. Put CTTO and then the link to that person.
This way, people would know that that person is the owner. You are just curating this content. This is a very important part of getting legal protection. You have to give proper attribution. You cannot give the impression that you created this content yourself.
Make sure to comment on the content
Under US copyright law as well as Canadian intellectual property law, if you use other people’s protected intellectual property, you can gain some protection for lawsuits when you do certain things. First of all, your sharing of the content must have some sort of commentary. Either you’re sharing it for news value or you’re sharing it to foster conversation.
This is how the fair use doctrine works. It is all about opening up copyright law to allow for genuine discussion. This way, when you comment, you are triggering the fair use doctrine. Now, I’m not saying that your comment should be very short and shallow. That’s probably not going to protect you.
If you are going to be curating other people’s viral content, your comment must be content in of itself. It must be that useful. It must have some sort of impact and it almost must add value to the content that you curating. You can’t just say, “Check this out” or “Haha, funny.” That’s not going to work.
Use this tremendous opportunity to talk about your niche. Use this opportunity to highlight your expertise and level of authority in your niche. This way, you can kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, you qualify the curated content under the fair use doctrine. This makes it harder for the owner of the content to sue you for copyright infringement.
Remember, under international intellectual property law, the only person who has a right to copy and distribute the copies of his or her original work is the content creator. Alternatively, that person may assign those rights to another person. Those are the only people who have legal rights under copyright law.
The fair use doctrine makes certain exceptions in certain contexts regarding that protection. This way, you can freely share somebody’s content, provided that you are adding commentary, adding value or you are positioning it to foster discussion.
It is also important to make sure that the content that you are sharing is not the whole content. For example, you are probably going to run into trouble if you share a complete movie that somebody else produces. But if you are going to share snippets of the video or screenshots like the stuff that you see on Buzzfeed, you probably will be okay.
You have to look at how much of the content you are quoting or sampling. If you use the whole content, then you may be in trouble. It is also important that you link to the source. This way, they benefit from your curation.
This creates a win-win situation.
In most cases, third-party content producers really don’t mind. In fact, they would love to encourage you. Why? The more you spread their content, the more traffic they get. The more you popularize their content, the stronger their brand becomes. You’re doing them a big favor. Things get a little dicey when you’re sharing snippets of popular movies or TV shows. That’s when things can get a little touchy.
Do yourself a big favor and make sure that there is commentary with the content that you are curating. Make sure that you use the acronym CTTO to protect yourself. Also, if you get any kind of complaint or notification from the rights owner, pull the curated content down. It’s not worth it. You don’t want to blow all the cash that you have managed to build up, creating your own distinct online brand, because you don’t want to let go of curated content.
If you’re doing this right, you should have a lot of curated materials anyway. You’re not really losing much if the rights owner tells you to pull down a few posts on your social media accounts. When you get such notifications, make sure you act on them promptly. Don’t sit on them. Don’t blow them off. You’re just going to be making things harder on yourself if they decide to sue you.
Make no mistake, intellectual property right law is no joke. There are fines that you can face and you might even spend jail time. It can get that bad, so do yourself a big favor and make sure you protect yourself adequately when sharing other people’s content.
Now, please understand that what makes this really murky is the fact that when content goes viral on the internet, it usually changes hands so many times. In fact, this may have happened so much that you really don’t know who the real owner is. You really don’t know who created that content in the first place.
Do yourself a big favor and make sure that you follow the rules above and you are very responsive to take down notices or notifications.