User-Generated Content Analysis

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“Someone is selling tshirts online with my art work on them.” HannahNew claimed on Deviantart’s general art related forum. She went on to say, “They erased my signature from the picture. I can prove that it is my art because I drew the picture back in 2008 five years ago.” That is horrible. An artist has devoted hours of work to their creation. They worked hard on it, and then they chose to freely share their creation with the world. Now someone else is claiming it for their own and profiting from that claim. Surely something can be done to stop this. However, HannahNew relates the catch “The only problem is that the art work is fan art meaning I do not own the characters, just the art. Has any one had this problem before?” Uh-Oh, …show more content…

According to him there are three main types of UGSC under the copyright laws user-authored content; user-copied content, and user-derived content. User-authored content, is any content that a user created in its entirety. User-copied content is copying an entire work and is a copyright infringement unless it can be considered fair use/dealing or covered by another specific exception. User-derivative content is content created by using parts of preexisting works that are changed by the …show more content…

Both Canadian and U.S. copyright law prohibit unauthorized posting of copyrighted UGC online. If a user of a website uploads copyright protected content to the site, both he and the site operator may be liable. The article explains and compares Canadian Bill C-11 that covers "non-commercial user-generated content" in certain circumstances with the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The Canadian Bill C-11 attempts to cover specific gaps in their copyright act, while the U.S. Copyright Act remains broader and less defined. Glickman and Fingerhut reference several Canadian and U.S. copyright court cases to highlight the differences these bills create.
Other issues that Glickman and Fingerhut detail are the posting of defamatory comments on a website, trademark issues which in the context of UGC occur when a website operator displays protected trademarks on its site, violation of privacy rights on sites with inadequate protection for individuals’ personal information, and the fact that UGC on social media sites are admissible in court as discoverable evidence. On the other side of issues stemming from UGC, Glickman and Fingerhut describe the advertising issues that occur when businesses use UGC without credit or