How Companies Are Profiting from Your Viral Social Media Posts and What You Can Do About It
If you have never seen this Vine video before, you're probably too young to be reading this article.
The girl in the video describes her appearance with a phrase that was unfamiliar to people at the time. People latched on to the phrase and the numbers on the video followed.
The 2014 video received nearly 700,000 likes, over half a million "revines" (equivalent to retweets on Twitter), and 53.4 million loops (amount of times people watched the vine video).
Kayla Newman is the young woman behind the lens. Since the video, she has made appearances on BET, MTV, and VH1, while featuring in Teen Vogue, The Huffington Post, and Paper Magazine (to name a few).
Like a lot of viral social media users, her fame came quick. Soon enough, everyone described anything as being “on fleek.” What Kayla didn't anticipate, however, was seeing her phrase being used by companies with no means of giving her credit. Several companies, mainly those in the beauty industry, have included "fleek" in their company names or products.
Kayla acted fast to have her unique phrase protected. She trademarked the phrases, “eyebrows on fleek,” “on fleek,” and “fleek” in 2015 through the United States Patent and Trademark Office. In recent years, she’s spoken about building an On Fleek Beauty Empire.
Megan Thee Stallion, a popular artist who is in the process of trademarking her phrase “hot girl summer,” also took action as soon as she saw companies using her phrase. For years, creativity from black youth has been used by companies to sell their products and services. These women knew what to do — and so can you.
Maybe you have a friend that became a viral meme one summer or a clever tweet you sent became a post in a BuzzFeed article. What should you do if you ever find yourself in a situation like Kayla or Meg, or better yet, if you want to be proactive about protecting your intellectual property?
The best answer is to get yourself familiar with these types of intellectual property rights and their processes and to know what happens when you post “unique ideas” to social media. I took some time to read up on Twitter’s copyright and fair use policies and Instagram's copyright policy as well. I’ll share some of what I’ve learned, but it is always best to read for yourself too!
If you post a unique form of media here, copyright it! People can save the photos you post here, and you don’t necessarily own the photo once you share it (again, unless you have protected it before).
Unlike Twitter, you own the unique images that you post to Instagram. You should know that the platform can still reshare your photos and those of other users too, as long as they do not violate copyright infringement. Your profile settings can prevent this from occurring.
So you get it--trademark, copyright, and patent your ideas. But what if you don't have the means to trademark your ideas like Kayla and Megan? Take a part of the profiting like this father and son did when their Facebook video went viral. They ended up in a Denny’s commercial shortly after.
The creativity of black youth, displayed in their linguistics, beauty products, and comedy, has been exploited for decades. Brush up on what you need to know because if these companies are profiting, why shouldn't you?
