Intellectual Property on Vine, Musically, and TikTok

Our conversations on intellectual property this week made me think about social media platforms that thrive on trends where you never know who started it. Vine, Musically, and TikTok are all forums where users can produce content and reproduce other content to gain followers, likes, and laughs. Oftentimes, these platforms will have trends- dances, songs, or jokes- where users duplicate content over, and over, and over until the trend dies out. In these spaces, intellectual property rarely exists and users seldom give credit to others. It is difficult to know who truly started a given trend and whether or not where you saw it is actually “ground zero.”

However, I have noticed certain communities engaging in more intellectual property credit. Amongst professional dancers and performers, you can sometimes find “Credit: @channelname” in the description of a post, acknowledging who started the trend. While the method may never be perfect, one should always be aware of the relationship between intellectual property and being a produser.

-SMT