Intellectual Property Removal Requests Report
July 1, 2022 – December 31, 2022
Published May 12, 2023
About this report
The creativity of our community is at the heart of what makes TikTok such an entertaining place. Our platform enables people’s creative expression to shine, and we do our best to protect it. Our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service prohibit content that infringes third party intellectual property rights. We honour valid removal requests based on infringements of copyright law and trademark law. Upon receiving a valid report of potential intellectual property infringement from a rights holder or authorised representative, TikTok may remove the alleged infringing content and temporarily or permanently suspend the infringing account. For information on how we evaluate intellectual property infringement allegations, please reference our Intellectual Property Policy.
The sections below show the copyright and trademark content removal requests we processed and the rate at which we removed content.
Analysis
We have observed an increase in the number of copyright and trademark removal requests compared to our last reporting period. We believe this is due in part to the occurrence of high-profile sporting events (e.g. FIFA World Cup), our efforts to deepen our engagement with rightsholders to share best practices for submitting valid requests, and our work to improve the effectiveness of the email verification process. For example, we now require a person to verify their email before they are able to submit a report, which has reduced the volume of spam and invalid reports we receive. Additionally, we observed a comparative decrease in the number of successful copyright and trademark removal requests. We believe this can be attributed in part to our efforts to deploy new tools that improve our ability to detect false ownership and multiple requests to remove the same content.
Latest data
DownloadTrademark and copyright content removal requests
Terminology
- Copyright: A legal right that protects original works of authorship (e.g. music, videos, etc.). Generally, copyright protects an original expression of an idea (e.g. the specific way a video or music is expressed or created) but does not protect underlying ideas or facts.
- Trademark: A word, symbol, slogan, design, or combination of any of the foregoing that identifies the source of a product or service and distinguishes it from other products or services.
- Total copyright removal requests: Number of removal requests where copyrights were asserted.
- Total trademark removal requests: Number of removal requests where trademarks were asserted.
- Successful copyright removal requests: Number of copyright removal requests that resulted in the removal of reported content and/or account suspension.
- Successful trademark removal requests: Number of trademark removal requests that resulted in the removal of reported content and/or account suspension.
- Percentage of successful copyright removal requests: Rate at which copyright removal requests resulted in the removal of reported content and/or account suspension.
- Percentage of successful trademark removal requests: Rate at which trademark removal requests resulted in the removal of reported content and/or account suspension.
Yes
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