China: Tiktok Transparency Report Highlights Positive Outcome On IP

Last month Tiktok, the famous video-sharing app, released its first transparency report highlighting a positive outcome on the legal prospective.

The Chinese-born platform dates back on 2016, owned by tech startup ByteDance (owner also of the Chinese app Douyin), increased drastically its number of downloads and popularity in a short period of time, to the point that is on the top 10 list of download apps of the decade.

This first report covers the first half year of 2019 from January 1st to June 30th; while a second part of the transparency report will be show later on 2020.

The report provides clarity and insights regarding governmental requests about user's information and other legal aspects.

Publishing this report, Tiktok outlined the number of legal requests received in the first semester of 2019.

The company's public policy and affairs attorney detected that the report shows that the company respond to 298 legal requests of information received by 28 different countries worldwide and also, they respond to legally valid requests and only for a requisite amount of information.

According to the report, the government request for user information with the help of law enforcement ranks a total of 278 requests for user data and content removal from 28 countries during that time period, including a total of 110 from India, 74 from the U.S. and 31 from Japan. China is not one of the countries listed.

Regarding the intellectual property field, it includes data on takedown notices from copyright holders, of which 3,345 were lodged in the first six months of 2019.

According to the company, 85% of these requests were honored; the highest rate if we compared it with other platform giants such as Facebook and Instagram (respectively with 70% and 65%).

In the app policy, it is attested that none of the contents should violate someone's copyright, trademarks, or other intellectual property rights.

Additionally, they actively contribute sharing an email address in which individual or brand can report a suspected IP infringement and consequently the platform is committed to solve the problem in a certain period of time.

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.