Brand Protection & Content Protection
-Takedown Guides-
Twitter IP Protection
A Guide To The Twitter Copyright Takedown Webform
Twitter – the breaking news information network for everyone to hear anything going on that matters to them from friends, celebrities, politicians and influencers in no more than 280 characters. A very simple concept which providing a platform for people to share messages to a network. The simplicity of the platform is partly behind Twitter’s success in reaching older generations who generally avoid other social networks. Twitter transforms major world events into open conversations. However, Twitter has social much the same as other large social networks with abuse from fake accounts and bot activity, distorting the conversation and manipulating users. Content governance on Twitter is a significant concern given the laissez-faire approach the company has handled such issues.
Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey said himself that the company has not done well enough to protect users from social network security issues and abuse. Although, his comments came at the surprising expense of digital IP protection policies. Dorsey claimed intellectual property protection was over-prioritised, although most brand owners or third-party vendors with experience with conducting digital brand protection on Twitter are not likely to agree with such claims. For handling copyright complaints, Twitter is responsive and efficient. In handling many other forms of abuse, Twitter is responsive and consistent. However, when it comes to brand enforcement of trade mark rights, Twitter often fails to deliver consistent results, with a lack of transparency behind decision making processes.
The focus of this guide is how-to submit a copyright infringement notice to Twitter through the “Report A Violation” DMCA form. Unfortunately, the reporter is required to have a Twitter account for the submission and the reporter must be either the copyright owner or an authorised representative of the copyright owner. The Twitter webform does enable the reporter to submit a takedown notice for Twitter, Vine or Periscope, which helpfully provides a layer of consistency across the Twitter brands. To access the webform to report copyright infringement, click here.
Report Copyright Infringement
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Twitter provides useful links to policies and has a guide how to report violations, which should be read and understood before proceeding to submit, as submitting a notice for intellectual property infringement has serious legal consequences which should be carefully considered. Once ready to continue, the first section of the webform should be completed with the details of the reporter and copyright owner. “Your email” field is required and will be auto-filled with the email address associated with the Twitter account. This can be changed in the webform, or changed for the account in “Settings & Privacy”. All other fields are mandatory except phone and fax numbers.
About your copyrighted work
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Select using the radio button the correct Twitter platform for “Where is this infringement happening?”. Unfortunately, whilst the webform enables reporting of Twitter or Periscope, both options cannot be selected in the same notice. Even if selecting “Yes” to “Adding more to report?”, the webform will automatically select the platform that was selected by the reporter in the section above. The Twitter webform does enable a limited amount of URLs from the same platform to be reported in a single notice, however, the process is cumbersome and has the poorest user-interface of any large social network platform. A full description of the work is advisable, unless the infringement is obvious when a “Link(s) to the original work” is also included i.e a Discogs link for a music file or IMDB for audiovisual content. If a URL to a database is provided, information in the “Describe Infringement” should be sufficient for Twitter to identify the infringement.
Required statements
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There are two checkboxes to tick to complete the submission alongside another highly cumbersome act of typing a statement into a box. The statement can be copied and pasted into the box. As mentioned above, submitting a notice for intellectual property infringement has serious legal consequences and therefore it is advised to read the statements carefully. By ticking the boxes the reporter agrees to being liable under the DMCA if the reporter knowingly materially misrepresents within the submission and the report is in good faith that the infringement is not authorised by the rightsholder, agent or law. The final step is for the reporter to type their name into the “Signature” box to electronically sign the notice, then click “Submit” and the intellectual property infringement takedown notice is sent for the infringement to be removed, pending review.