Copyright infringement is never a good thing. Unfortunately, the proliferation of such acts is harder to stop online than it is in real life. In line with this, Facebook is currently moving towards helping more businesses crackdown on the unapproved use of their intellectual property across its family of apps. This “aid” comes in the form of an update to its Commerce and Ads IPS Tool, which it’s also renaming to ‘Brand Rights Protection’.
Facebook Feds
The new Brand Rights Protection will allow businesses to upload photos or images of their licensed products, which Facebook’s systems will then use as a reference point to detect similar matches and potential usage violations.
Facebook explains:
“Brand Rights Protection allows enrolled trademark owners to search and report content that they believe infringes on their IP rights, and now offers features to streamline and automate the process.”
Businesses will now also need to register their trademark certificates and credentials with Facebook, which then gives them access to the tool and bust any would-be product-counterfeiter.
The new platform’s creme-dela-creme is the capacity to upload and save up to 10 photos, including logos and product images, to be used as scanning reference for content across Facebook and Instagram. Up until now, brands had no way to save searches, nor did they have any viable means to proactively find leads. The update hopes to fix all of that by providing businesses with additional capabilities for tracking and monitoring, thus helping IP owners to better detect potential violations with their licensed products.
There are no loose belts with Facebook this time. They’re taking it to the next step by also expanding the tool’s search capacity beyond paid ads. Brands will now be able to search and report Instagram accounts or posts that they think might be infringing on their rights.
This is a pretty significant expansion and greatly improves the ability of legitimate brands to safeguard their intellectual property. The new regulations will likely catch a lot more IP violations and could even extend to unwanted/unlicensed influencer posts.
All of this is summed up in a nice and cozy new dashboard which displays the total number of IP actions, including status of any reports and historic activity. Basically, along with the new gadget comes an all new command-center to boot.
The Wrap
These additions give brands more of that much needed control and sense of security over their products online. What has always been the problem is the lack of monitoring and tracking tools to detect and counter potential acts of infringement. In extending the capability to detect and archive IP violations to brands that use Facebook and it’s family of apps, Facebook itself is also safeguarding its own reputation and credibility as copyright infringement and breaching of fair-use clauses have gradually become rampant over the years.
Such is the difficulty of not having an arbitrary regulatory body over the entire internet, but that is a topic for another day. Hopefully as more businesses utilize Brands Rights Protection, we’ll start to see less and less of those scam glasses or bargain LV designer bags – which is probably for the best considering that eCommerce is steadily on the rise.
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