14 Feb How To Report Intellectual Property Infringement with Meta

I recently came across a social media blog housed on a Facebook page with no website, that screenshot a photo I took of Courtney Laplante from Spiritbox and put it in a side-by-side with another photographer’s image of Ronnie Radke. They were reporting on comments Radke made about Laplante and Spiritbox dropping off tour with them, and their post was going viral.

I was super irritated once I looked at the profile’s bio and it noted that this person was making money off of this page, and upon further scrolling, I could tell this person was stealing random photos off the internet to use for their “content” and not crediting anyone, and on top of that was making money off it.

Now sure, you can watermark your photos, but people can still crop out the watermark depending on the image. Funny enough, had I watermarked this image for my publication, ACRONYM ZINE, they would have cropped it if that’s where it had been pulled. I had this specific crop of the image just for Instagram however, and I could tell that’s where they found it.

Now, what can you do when something like this happens? If you click “report,” it doesn’t give you any help as to how to report that your intellectual property has been stolen. After running through the Meta Helpdesk, they sent me this form, which I will share with you now:

The link, which I will leave fully exposed is https://www.facebook.com/help/ipreporting/report/copyright/, and as I worked through the process, I had to provide:

• Link to the post that is committing the steal
• Link to my website/where the photo was published (I offered both the ZINE and my Portfolio page as proof)
• Screenshots (both of the stolen image on their post, as well as my Instagram post of that image which went viral)
• I also provided a screenshot of their profile header where they admit to receiving payouts from Meta for their content.

Within a little over an hour, the post was taken down, and it was super easy to do. Keep this in your back pocket if you should ever have an issue with your content being posted without your consent on a Meta property.