How to protect your story. A lawyer's opinion on the first case of protecting IP rills on Instagram.
In the spring of 2024, the Arbitration Court of the Moscow Region ruled in compensation in the amount of 300,000 rubles for plagiarizing Rills (short video) on Instagram.
The case involves two real estate brokers, one of whom posted the “5 Things You Need to Do After You Pay Off Your Mortgage” reel, which received 11 million views, and after a while, subscribers noticed a very similar video from another broker who copied the vertical video, then edited it a little and posted it on his own page to attract an audience. Then the former demanded compensation in the amount of 500,000 rubles for plagiarism and went to court. According to his lawyer, the second broker copied the video “inside and out”.
The court found that there was a violation of intellectual property rights to the video and the content was completely copied by the defendant. According to the court decision, the defendant illegally used the plaintiff's intellectual property: he completely copied the text, sequence, structure and content of the video, and posted similar images in the background of the text.
An interesting question is who and at what point will recognize the authorship and intellectual property rights of such works, since they are often copies from other memes translated into Russian. Will fraudsters abuse applications for recognition of authorship the way they did until recently with buying rights to photos, posting them publicly, and then lawsuits against websites that used these photos?
- Alina Kalanda, Senior Partner With Cases
The most important thing in this case is to copy the results of intellectual activity. When it comes to copying a reel, it's about copying the idea, the structure of the presentation, the approach to presentation and visual performance. This is intellectual activity. In this sense, Rills is no different from any other video product. It is also important that this video product was used for commercial activities and was not only entertaining.
Andrey Tugarin, C Cases Partner
This is Russia's first court case involving a short vertical video on social media, and in this case it may be a precedent. Who knows, maybe the time is around the corner when Ilya Varlamov will have to recover all his stolen tweets.
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