Tehrell Porter is used to getting his work promoted by local businesses on social media. The Hawai‘i-based artist is known for his hyper-realistic murals that pay tribute to famous figures like Kobe Bryant, Max Holloway and Fiji.
He often documents his artistic process through videos that are widely shared across social media accounts. However, Porter was surprised to see a few business accounts had to remove his videos even though he gave them permission to use them.
Porter had signed an agreement with BVIRAL, a Tennessee-based licensing company that helps promote content creators but also monitors the internet to ensure its clients' videos are not being shared without their permission.
What Porter signed up for was not what he expected.
“I was under the impression that I was giving them the rights to use the videos for promoting my artwork on their pages,” he said.
In actuality, Porter gave BVIRAL rights to pursue copyright claims on his behalf.
Now, people who typically support artists by posting those artists' works on social media are getting hit with takedown notices.
The issue illustrates unintended consequences when artists sign contracts with companies like BVIRAL that file copyright claims against businesses that also work with artists.
“It's definitely affecting people who have admired my work, and it just creates a disturbance and makes everything a little bit more stagnant,” Porter said.
Unintended consequences
BVIRAL is a licensing company that helps promote artists' works but also looks for accounts that have reported their content and pursue infringement claims on an artist's behalf.
The popular Instagram account for World Wide Walls even got its account revoked. The group has organized public art murals in Hawaiʻi for more than a decade, and the social media account featured local and international artists. The Instagram account had more than 350,000 followers before it got shut down in late April.
Jasper Wong, who founded the nonprofit in 2009, started receiving copyright infringement notices last year.
“I didn't think that much into it because I thought that it'd be good if I just deleted those posts,” Wong said. “But it only dawned on me that it was all coming from one company.”
When he reached out to Meta, a representative said “Meta cannot resolve disputes between third polarities.” Wong was then told to reach out to the company that reported the claims.
The more he looked into it, Wong found that various business accounts on social media have also been affected. Those companies have reached out to IPShield, which is the copyright enforcement division of BVIRAL.
The company charges $1,000 as a settlement arrangement “with a one-time $500 discount applied to a first-time offense" to resolve the issue.
That's a price his nonprofit cannot afford, Wong said.
“It makes it much harder for us to be a platform to share artists' work, because we'd be afraid that they'll be used against us to have our account taken away again,” he said.
'A rights management-partner'
After seeing some of these notices, Porter tried to ask a company representative on social media for a copy of his contract agreement but did not get a response.
HPR reached out to its founder, Jonathan Burdon, who only provided written responses through email.
Burdon said that the company handles 65,000 creators and that there's a support email for creators to contact the company. He added that Porter completed the signing process, provided a digital signature and a copy was sent to Porter.
“What we're doing is hard, and I don’t think we always do a good enough job explaining why. We're operating in an industry that grew up without much structure around ownership, licensing, or payment,” Burdon said.
He also described the company as a rights-management partner, adding that the creators still have ownership of their work and “grant us defined licensing and enforcement rights under a written agreement.”
Artists said it's been harder to get promotions, but Burdon said what may look like “free promotion can also divert views and revenues away from the creator and reduce the value of the original to legitimate licenses."
Conflicting interests
Bill Meyer, a principal of Honolulu-based Settle Meyer Law, said these types of companies have existed for years. He described them as "copyright trolls."
He said artists don't realize that by granting certain rights to a licensing company that it would go after other businesses that also have a partnership with the artists.
“It's pretty tough. If you sign a contract, we're going to assume that you read the freaking contract,” he said.
Meyer said an artist may be able to get out of their contract if there's fraudulent inducement. That means if a company representative misled an artist, they might be able to get out of their contract.
“Lots of local artists don’t have the resources to hire counsel because everything is kind of on a small scale,” Meyer said. “I’m not talking about Bruno Mars. You’re talking about a small artist who loves his art.”
As of July 9, Porter reached out to BVIRAL to get out of his contract. He was still waiting for a response.
Porter's advice to other artists who have been reached out to by BVIRAL is, “Don’t do it.”
“Read through contracts and everything, and make sure there's no hidden contracts,” he said.
