'Facebook profiles contain as much as €15.000 worth of copyrighted content'

Today, Cologne-based lawyer Christian Solmecke draws our attention to an interesting area of copyright: the social networks. Perhaps this article is especially relevant for parents of young surfers.

Millions of teenagers are currently communicating on the new social networks. Typically, they pimp up their profile with pictures of movie stars, music, songs or other copyrighted material. The German lawyer predicts chasing Facebook-profiles could be big business for companies or lawyer with an aggressive game plan.

While the general public is becoming more and more aware of the existence of legal limits to what they can and cannot do online, this doesn’t seem to apply to young people on platforms such as MySpace and Facebook.

Solmecke advises parents to take copyright violations seriously and to occasionally check their children’s Facebook profile, to see if their entertainment collection is growing out of control. Coming from a German lawyer, this parental advice seems slightly out of place. However, Solmecke predicts lawsuits against Facebook users that display "too much" copyright-protected content on their page. This would be particularly sad for the parents of young users, since the amounts of money in intellectual property cases often exceeds the average pocket money.

"Millions of people, especially kids, maintain a Facebook profile," said the media law expert, "They do this for private purposes, but because they often display content to a few hundred friends, we reach the limits of what can be called private use of the footage.” According to Solmecke, it is just a matter of time before somebody argues that “Facebookers” should be treated as journalists. "If you look at the quantity and scope of copyrighted material that is posted without the blink of an eye, I’d say the average Facebook profile is worth as much as €15,000,- to a smart lawyer."

Solmecke recommends Facebook-users (and their parents), to keep an eye on pictures of celebrities, YouTube videos, My Music Videos, lyrics and quotes of famous people. Although this seems feasible, it will undoubtedly be an arbitrary call to determine when the line is crossed. Let alone legal debates on the privacy and image rights of all people whose photo appears somewhere on the social network… In short, the advice from Cologne is: Pimping your profile is fine, but don’t exaggerate.

References: Köln Nachrichten, Christian Solmecke