How to protect your story: a lawyer's view on the first case protecting the IP in an Instagram Reel
7 August 2024Author
Alina KalandaPractices
What happened
In spring 2024, the Arbitrazh Court of the Moscow Region awarded RUB 300,000 in compensation for plagiarism of a Reel (a short video) on Instagram.
The case involved two real estate brokers. One of them published a Reel, "5 things to do after paying off your mortgage", which gained 11 million views. Some time later, followers noticed a very similar video from another broker, who had copied the vertical video, edited it slightly and published it under his own name on his page to attract an audience. The first broker then demanded RUB 500,000 in compensation for plagiarism and went to court. According to his lawyer, the second broker copied the video "from start to finish".
The court found that intellectual property rights in the video had been infringed and that the defendant had copied the content in full. According to the judgment, the defendant unlawfully used the claimant's intellectual property: he copied the text, sequence, structure and content of the video in full and placed similar images behind the text.
A lawyer's view
An interesting question is who will recognise authorship and intellectual property rights in such works, and at what point, since they are often copies of other memes translated into Russian. Will fraudsters abuse authorship claims, as happened not long ago with buying up rights to photographs, posting them publicly and then suing websites that used those photographs?
Alina Kalanda, Senior Partner, C Cases
The most important thing in this case is the copying of the results of intellectual activity. When we talk about copying a Reel, we mean copying the idea, the structure of the presentation, the approach to presentation and the visual execution. That is intellectual activity. In this sense, Reels are no different from any other video product. It is also important that this video product was used for commercial activity and was not purely for entertainment.
Andrey Tugarin, Partner, C Cases
Implications for business
This is the first court case in Russia concerning a short vertical video on social media, and it may set a precedent. Who knows — perhaps the day is not far off when Ilya Varlamov will have to give back all the tweets he has borrowed.