Instagram has become one of the leading social media platforms of the 21^st century. It has millions of users, but also thousands (if not millions) of copyright infringing posts on their platform. The only way to get it taken down is by taking matters in your own hand, and start reporting copyright infringement to Instagram directly. This can be somewhat daunting if you’ve never navigated through Instagram’s support pages, but we’re here to help you out.

Summary:

• Instagram and their history of piracy
• How to report copyright infringement to Instagram
• What happens after your notice
• How we can help you out

Instagram and their history of piracy

The history

Instagram is one of the social media giants we are all familiar with nowadays. This giant first became available to the public in the 2010 when owners Krieger and Systrom uploaded it to the iOS App Store. It was an immediate success when 25,000 users signed up on the first day.

Instagram kept growing and in 2011, one year after its release, it was already valued at $25 million by Benchmark Capital. In this year, Instagram also started to garner the interest of other tech companies such as Twitter. In fact, Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter) offered $500 million for Instagram; however Systrom refused it.

2012 brought Instagram even more growth than the year prior. A whopping 27 million users had now registered for their application, and when they released Instagram for Android it got a staggering 1 million downloads within a day.

This was also the year that Instagram was bought by Facebook. Owner Mark Zuckerberg took an interest in the company and doubled Jack Dorsey’s offer by paying $1 billion for Instagram.

Piracy on Instagram

The rise of Instagram has brought a lot of business, joy and fame to its users, but it also came with its issues. The main issue we’re talking about is copyright infringement and digital piracy. It’s extremely easy for someone to upload a photo or video to Instagram that does not belong to them.

In fact, one can do a simple search on Instagram and find copyright infringing results almost immediately. A quick search for the keyword “Full Movie HD” results in a list of accounts that are sharing URLs to infringing sites and hashtags that are leading to illegal photos and videos.

Instagram themselves are not actively going against copyright infringements either. Like Facebook, TikTok and Pinterest, they expect their users to file copyright infringement reports. This means that finding and reporting illegal photos and videos on Instagram is on you.

How to report copyright infringement to Instagram

Luckily, we’re here to help you out.  At Onsist, we’ve reported thousands of copyright infringing Instagram posts for our clients. We’ve put all the knowledge we have of reporting illegal posts in the blog, so you can report any infringements easily and immediately.

Step 1: Navigate to form

The first step in reporting a copyright infringing Instagram post is to navigate to their reporting form. To save you some time, we’ve done it for you: https://help.instagram.com/contact/552695131608132.

Secondly, you have to describe your relationship to the entitled part by select one of the three options:

1. “I am the copyright owner” if you’re the owner.
2. “I report on behalf of my organization or client” if you’re doing that.
3. “I’m reporting on behalf of someone else” if you’re doing that.

Step 2: Fill in contact information

The second step in reporting copyright infringement to Instagram is to give Instagram basic contact information. Here’s what you’re going to fill in:

• Full name
  • This will the full name of the person filling in this form.
• Mailing Address
  • Fill in the address of your business, organization or home address.
• Email Address
  • This will be the email address that receives confirmation messages and updates from Instagram.
• Name of the entitled party
  • This will be the name of your business, brand or organization. If you don’t have any of those options, you can fill in your own name as the copyright owner.
• Location of rights owner
  • Where is your brand, business or organization located?
• Description of your copyrighted work
  • In order to describe your copyrighted work, you’ll have to select what type of work it is. You’ll have several options to choose from.
• URLs to copyrighted work
  • Finally, Instagram needs a URL to your copyrighted work. The more specific this URL is, the better. For example, giving Instagram a URL to a product page will be much more helpful than giving them a URL to your home page.

Step 3: Provide content you want to report

The third step of reporting copyright infringing content to Instagram is to provide the infringing posts, videos and photos.

First off, Instagram needs you to select what type of content you’re reporting. This could be a photo, video, message, story or an advertisement. You can also select the other option and describe what you’re trying to report.

Secondly, you will need to provide direct URLs to the infringing Instagram content. These need to be URLs directly leading to posts. Instagram will not accept an entire profile in the copyright infringement form.

Finally, select a reason for reporting the content you want to report. You also get the option to provide additional information that can help Instagram understand your report. Our advice is to fill this in since it will only help your case.

Step 4: Sign and send your copyright infringement notice to Instagram

The final step is to simply sign the form you’ve just filled in by giving your full name and pressing the “Send” button. Your form will now be send to Instagram, and you’ll get a confirmation mail mentioning that they’ve received your complaint and that an employee will look at it as soon as possible.

What happens after your notice

So what happens after your notice has been submitted? As briefly mentioned in step 4 of reporting copyright infringement to Instagram, you’ll first receive a confirmation mail from Instagram mentioning that an employee is going to look at it as soon as possible.

It can take 4 to 48 hours for a support employee to look at your ticket and give you a reply. When you get a reply from Instagram, it can mean three things:

1. Instagram has accepted your complaint and they’ve taken down the copyright infringements.
2. Instagram needs more information. They could need more information on your copyright work, for you to proof you’re the owner or they need more information on why the reported content is copyright infringing.
3. Instagram has reject your complaint. If you’ve filled in everything correctly, there’s only a small chance of Instagram rejecting your notice, but it can happen. Try again.

That’s it! You’ve now reporting your first copyright infringement to Instagram.

How we can help you out

Going after copyright infringing content on social media such as Instagram can be an exhausting task. A solution to this is to hire a brand protection provider which can do this work for you.

Onsist has been around for more than 10 years and offers brand protection solutions for small, medium and large businesses. We can help you out with keeping social media clean and rid off copyright infringing and pirated content.

We will also help you with taking down illegally shared content on file sharing sites, video sites, cyber lockers, search engines and many more online sources.