Stop People from Stealing Your Online Content w/ a Copyright

Let’s say you’re a content creator, a YouTuber, or an influencer. Your content is your business, so what are you going to do if someone steals your content? I’m Ethan Wall, a copyright attorney, and I’m here to teach you how you could protect your content from people stealing it.

Let’s face it, it sucks when people steal your stuff. When you are an online content creator, or an influencer, or a YouTuber, your content is king, meaning that’s your business. Look, Nike sells shoes, McDonald’s sells hamburgers, you sell content, and if someone is taking your content and putting it on their profiles or passing it off as their own, and they’re not paying you for it, they’re taking money out of your pocket and taking credit for your hard work. But there are ways that you can protect yourself as a content creator.

How to Stop People from Stealing Your Content

But before I talk about how you can proactively protect your content, let’s answer the question at hand. How can you stop people from stealing your content? Usually the situation is as follows:

You created an Instagram post, a YouTube video, a mini-documentary, whatever – and all of a sudden you see that someone else’s profile is using your video, your photo, or your content, and you’re pissed off about it. Trust me, I’d be pissed off too.

So, what can you do at this point? There are a few different things that you can do. The first thing that you can do if you believe that someone has stolen your content is report it to the social media site where they have stolen and posted your stuff. You could file what’s called a copyright violation, or an intellectual property takedown notice, and you can say, “YouTube, Instagram, I own this content, this person stole it, I want you to take it off of their profile, and if this is someone that does it all the time, I want their profiles banned.” That’s maybe the fastest way to get your content off of someone else’s profile.

The problem is, in order to do that, YouTube and other social media sites are going to want to have proof that you own the copyright to your work. And if you haven’t filed for copyright protection, they likely won’t take it down. Also, this a pretty reactive solution, meaning that the harm’s already been done, your stuff has already been stolen, and even if the video does get taken down, it doesn’t stop somebody from doing it in the future, and you’re certainly not getting compensated for that.

So, what’s the second thing that you can do? You can serve someone with a cease and desist letter. A cease and desist letter is something you can write yourself, or you could have a lawyer like, I don’t know, The Social Media Law Firm help you to write a demand letter to the person who is stealing your content, saying “Hey, my content creator owns the copyright to this photo or video, you stole it and posted it on your profile. Not only do you need to stop doing this forever and take it down, we’re going to demand money from you for stealing your content, and stop you from doing it again in the future, or we could sue your butt in court for copyright infringement.”

Now, as you can see, sending a letter from a copyright lawyer is a little bit stronger than just sending a takedown notice to a social media site, but here’s the problem with that: if you haven’t filed for copyright protection over your photos or videos or creative work, then your cease and desist letter might not have a strong legal backing. The reason why is in order to enforce your demand letter if they don’t respond, you’re going to have to (a) file for copy protection, (b) sue them, and (c) prove that you either lost money as a result of them stealing your content, or that they inappropriately gained income from using your creative works. That is often very difficult to prove, plus you have to go through filing a lawsuit, and then you’re going to have to try to collect evidence of this, and this is a really expensive and complicated process.

And you might be thinking to yourself, “Man, I really want to take this person to court because they stole my stuff, but I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars out of my own money going after somebody,” and trust me, I get it, I wouldn’t want to do it too. Look, if you came to my office and said to me, “Man, someone stole my video, and I may have lost a few hundred dollars,” I’m going to say to you, “Look, do you want to spend a few thousand dollars going after them in court?” It puts you in a bad position.

So, you’re thinking to yourself, “Ethan, this kind of sucks. You’re telling me that option one is try to get it taken down, option two is sending a cease and desist letter, but neither option is good,” and I almost kind of agree with you, but there is a third option. This is what every content creator needs to know to protect your work.

If you’re an influencer, you’re a YouTuber, you’re a content creator, then you must know number three, and that is you must copyright your creative works before someone steal them.

Content Creators Must Copyright their Content Before Its Stolen

Right now, you may be thinking that you technically own a copyright from the moment that you create a video, photo, or creative work. And you’re right, to an extent. You own what’s called common law copyrights, meaning that you have the ability to potentially stop somebody from using your work, but you have to go through those legal hurdles we talked about above, like proving you lost money or they made money, and that’s really hard. And if you want to file a lawsuit, you have to copyright your work anyway as a prerequisite, so it’s really difficult to enforce your copyrights, even though you technically do have rights the moment that you create your content.

But the moment that you file for U.S. copyright protection and that protection is approved, you get so significantly more rights under the law. First, you don’t have to prove that somebody had access to your work. By getting a copyright, you’re protected across the entire country from anybody who kind of takes your stuff. It is assumed that they should have known that you had a copyright, and you get instant rights to prosecute them. But what’s more important, you don’t have to prove that you lost any money, and you don’t have to prove that they made any money off of your work, you are entitled to what’s called “statutory damages.”

Statutory damages are a specific amount of damages that you would be entitled to in a copyright lawsuit by law without even proving that you lost any money. The word “Statutory” comes from “Statute,” which means law. And by law, you are entitled to $750 at minimum, or up to $30,000 at maximum, every time somebody steals your content. Additionally, you now have the ability, to then file a takedown notice with YouTube or whoever with confidence they are going to take it down immediately.

Second, you can then send a cease and desist letter to someone and say, “Look, you stole my content. I’m the owner of a U.S. copyright over this content, therefore in addition to taking it down, I have the ability to march into court and win tens of thousands of dollars potentially from you and your infringing acts, therefore not only do I want you to take it down, I want you to pay me $5,000, $10,000, $15,000,” whatever you can reasonably establish is the value.

And that cease and desist letter becomes much stronger when sent by a copyright lawyer, because now when the person who stole your work hands this letter to their attorney, their attorney’s going to say, “I don’t know, you’re not in a good position here, they have a copyright. If they walked into court, they’d be entitled to getting a money judgment against you, and an injunction. You may want to instead try to pay this person off for stealing their work, and make this thing go away before they file a lawsuit.”

So as you can see, filing for copyright protection is the best way to protect you from people stealing your stuff, and by having a copyright, you have so many more rights to do so, and it’s not incredibly expensive to go ahead and get a copyright. If you wanted to file it on the Copyright Office on your own, it would cost you couple hours of your time and a few hundred dollars. If you want an attorney to do it for you, they’re going to make sure that they do it right.

Work with a Social Media Copyright Attorney

We here at The Social Media Law Firm file for copyright protection all the time, and we know how to protect your content. We often protect a bundle of your content, meaning lots of photos and lots of videos and lots of content all at once, to help you save money in the process and get the most protection possible. That’s the key to having people stop them from stealing your stuff is to protect your stuff before someone steals it.

So, if you need help protecting your stuff as an influencer, content creator, or YouTuber, it would our pleasure at The Social Media Law Firm to help you. We’d be thrilled to be your copyright law firm. Contact us today.