Commercializing User-Generated Content: Five Risk Reduction Strategies

We're in the midst of a seismic shift in how companies interact with user-generated content (UGC).

For years, companies were happy simply to host UGC on their websites, blogs and social media pages and reap the resulting boost to their traffic numbers. And U.S. law—in the form of Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—accommodated this passive use of UGC by creating a safe harbor from copyright damages for websites, blogs and social media platform operators that hosted UGC posted without the authorization of the owners of the copyrights in such UGC, so long as such operators complied with the requirements of the safe harbor.

Increasingly, companies are no longer satisfied with passively hosting UGC. Rather, they now want to find creative ways to commercialize such content—by incorporating it into ads (including print, TV and other offline ads), creating new works based on such content and even selling such content. Yet, in moving beyond mere