TikTok Copyright Notices Up Again in 2023, Success Rate Collapses to 56%

Reports seem to vary but if servicing a billion users each month sounds like a lot, TikTok is on a mission to push way beyond that.

Early January 2018, the platform acknowledged it had around 55 million global users then in December the same year, that figure had suddenly grown to 271 million.

A year later, 271 million ballooned to over 500 million, then a year after that, over 700 million users were active on TikTok every month.

While not yet in the same league as Facebook with its user base of over 3.5bn, TikTok’s format is also proving popular among its competitors, many of which drew inspiration from TikTok before launching their own, functionally similar services.

Another thing they have in common is copyright complaints. These are the unavoidable reality of expecting the public to think twice before bashing the like, subscribe, upload, and equivalent buttons, when there’s almost nothing to prevent them from doing so whenever they please.

TikTok Says Creators Are Valued

TikTok’s transparency report has been developing since its first release, covering the first six months of 2019. The platform has weathered many storms since then and, along with owner Bytedance, is currently hoping to overturn what it believes is an unconstitutional ban at the hands of the United States government.

Unsurprisingly, copyright issues have also thrust TikTok into unfavorable light, with numerous rightsholders arguing that the social media platform could do much more to protect artists’ rights. According to a statement alongside its latest transparency report, TikTok exists to help creators thrive.

“The creativity of our community is at the heart of what makes TikTok such an entertaining place. Our platform enables people’s creative expression to shine, and we do our best to protect it,” TikTok writes.

“Our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service prohibit content that infringes third-party intellectual property rights. We honor valid removal requests based on infringements of copyright law and trademark law.”

Copyright Takedowns at TikTok

TikTok says that upon receiving a “valid report of potential intellectual property infringement from a rights holder or authorized representative, TikTok may remove the alleged infringing content and temporarily or permanently suspend the infringing account.”

Released every six months, TikTok’s transparency reports bundle copyright and trademark takedown notices together. Using the raw data made available as part of TikTok’s reporting, we removed trademark-related statistics and homed-in on copyright matters, to produce the charts seen below.

TikTok Copyright Takedowns By Volume (2021-2023)

Data available pre-2021 shows that TikTok tested various types of reporting, such as isolating complaints received from the United States and Canada, and presenting those figures against takedown requests received from the rest of the world. Given the changing nature of the data, anything that pre-dates 2021 is excluded here.

For the first five months of 2021, data includes notices that failed to comply with the DMCA and its European equivalent. That may explain the sudden drop in reported notices but thereafter, reporting from TikTok is consistent.

Almost 50,000 takedown notices were reported in the second half of 2021, a figure that nearly doubles in the following half-year’s figures. Between July and December 2022, takedown notices processed by TikTok increased by 56%, to an all-time high of 168,141 over a six-month period.

Last year saw even bigger increases in the volume of copyright takedown complaints. For the full 12 months, TikTok says it handled 462,120 takedown notices, more than it received during the previous two years combined. Not all of these notices achieved what their senders intended, however.

Takedown Notices vs. Successful Takedown Notices

According to notes accompanying TikTok’s transparency reporting, a ‘successful’ copyright removal request is one that, in the first instance, meets the statutory requirements of the DMCA, its European equivalent (EUCD), or relevant legislation elsewhere in the world.

Having met or exceeded those standards, a takedown notice is deemed ‘successful’ if it results in the removal of the reported content and/or leads to an alleged infringer’s account being suspended.

TikTok ‘Successful’ Copyright Takedowns (percentage of total)

TikTok’s data shows that since the second half of 2021, successful notices have never numbered more than around eight in every ten of the total received. As a general trend, takedown notices have become increasingly unsuccessful over the past couple of years.

Details of why so many notices fail to achieve their aims are absent from TikTok’s reporting. Close to half failing to have any effect in the last six months of 2023 is an all-time low, if we discount the first half of 2021 as a reporting anomaly.

Running Totals Since 2021 – A Drop in the Ocean

It’s perhaps a sign of the times when the 800K+ takedown notices processed by TikTok between 2021 and 2023 seems like a small amount. As reported last week, Google processed over a billion notices in a four-month period in the first half of 2024, albeit thanks to a few billion more users.

That being said, ‘just’ a billion users at TikTok could be reasonably expected to generate more takedown notices than the 800K+ reported thus far. However, those sending ‘unsuccessful’ notices may also need to take note; 500K+ notices appear to have been dumped in the trash since 2021, well over half of the total number of notices processed by TikTok.

TikTok Copyright Takedowns (Running total since 2021)

TikTok’s full transparency report is available here

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

TorrentFreak