Do you look after any sort of social media content?
If so, especially if it’s business related, you’ve probably received your fair share of copyright infringement complaints.
No matter how scrupulous you are about correctly licensing and attributing your content, you may be the victim of a scurillous or over-zealous complainant.
For example, we went through a phase recently during which a spammer took to emailing us about images that we had licensed via Shutterstock, implying that we were using them illegally. (We were not.)
The spammer offered us specious conditions to help “regularise” our use of the image – complete with a thinly-disguised warning that “removing the image isn’t the solution since you have been using our image on your website for a while now.”
Sometimes, however, a complainant may be prepared to make an claim on the record by lodging a formal infringement complaint with the site where your content is hosted.
In such cases, you may indeed be contacted by the relevant social media company to try to sort the issue out.
Ignoring genuine complaints is not really an option, given that the social media site may decide to remove the offending material unilaterally, or even to lock you out of your account temporarily, if you don’t respond within a reasonable time.
As you can imagine, this creates an opening for cybercriminals to frighten you into responding by sending out a fake takedown message.
To read more of this article written by Paul Ducklin, click here.