How to protect your story. A lawyer's opinion on the first case of IP protection for an Instagram Reel.
What Happened
In spring 2024, the Moscow Region Arbitration Court ruled to award 300,000 rubles in compensation for plagiarism of an Instagram Reel (short video).
The case involves two real estate brokers. One of them published a Reel titled "5 Things to Do After Paying Off Your Mortgage," which garnered 11 million views. After some time, subscribers noticed a very similar video by another broker, who copied the vertical video, then slightly edited it, and published it under their own name on their page to attract an audience. The first broker then demanded 500,000 rubles in compensation for plagiarism and went to court. According to his lawyer, the second broker copied the video "from start to finish."
The court recognized that there was an infringement of intellectual property rights for the video and that the content was fully copied by the defendant. According to the court's decision, the defendant illegally used the plaintiff's intellectual property: they completely copied the text, sequence, structure, and content of the video, and also placed similar images against the text background.
Legal Opinion
An interesting question is who and at what point will recognize authorship and intellectual property rights for such works, as they are often copies of other memes translated into Russian. Will fraudsters abuse claims of authorship, similar to what recently happened with the acquisition of rights to photographs, their public posting, and subsequent lawsuits against websites that used these photos?
- Alina Kalanda, Senior Partner, C Cases
The most important aspect of this case is the copying of intellectual property. When it comes to copying a Reel, it specifically refers to copying the idea, the structure of presentation, the approach to presentation, and the visual execution. This is precisely 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 solely for entertainment purposes.
Andrey Tugarin, Partner, C Cases
Business Implications
This is the first court case in Russia concerning a short vertical video on social media, and in this instance, it may be a precedent-setting one. Who knows, perhaps the time is not far off when Ilya Varlamov will have to return all his stolen tweets.