Viral Nation’s new product aims to protect companies from copyright issues

Content creator-focused marketing and tech company Viral Nation is introducing new features to let companies know if creator- and user-generated videos contain any copyrighted content.

“Too many of my marketing peers are facing legal and financial repercussions for promoting assets that leverage trending audio and music files on social media,” Scott Leatherman, Viral Nation’s chief marketing officer, said in a statement. “Just last week, I spoke to an earned media manager at a large retailer who was in tears because they had to remove more than 300 of their top performing assets because of copyright infringement.”

Copyright issues can arise when companies are “entrusting brand ambassadors to deploy creative campaigns that engage target audiences while adhering to ever-changing copyright and licensing laws,” Viral Nation adds.

Basically, if a content creator partner makes a sponsored video using a song or sound clip that violates copyright/licensing laws (something that’s easy to do by mistake, especially with copyrighted sounds), companies can be legally liable, and sued by rightsholders.

Viral Nation is aiming to prevent that with new machine-learning features for its brand safety tool Viral Nation_Secure.

Now, Viral Nation_Secure can catch copyrighted content automatically. That means if a company is, for example, looking to license a user-generated video for its official advertising campaign, it can see ahead of time if the video has any copyright issues. And, if it’s working directly with a creator to make sponsored videos, it can tell that there’s no copyrighted content before videos are posted.

Viral Nation_Secure also has another purpose. It can “audit and monitor social media activity of brand advocates, sponsored influencers, executives and employees, ensuring their online behavior is consistent with the brand’s core values,” Viral Nation says.

Companies will be able to have Viral Nation_Secure scan for “instances of profanity, intolerance, hate speech, violence, graphic or sexually suggestive content, illegal or regulated substances, specific industry regulations and more,” it adds.

“Introducing the new patented copyright detection features to Viral Nation_Secure will further bolster our brand safety and reputation management solution offering,” Mat Micheli, co-founder and co-CEO of Viral Nation, said in a statement. “We are proud to be the first brand safety solution to develop and deliver a frictionless solution as part of our platform to help companies mitigate risk and better protect their brands while in turn protecting content rights holders.”

Viral Nation is holding demos of _Secure here.