Features of Legal Regulation of Intellectual Property on Social Media

Taking into consideration the current technological development, it is important to determine the legal status of Intellectual Property objects in social media due to the fact that copying or significant borrowing of account elements on social media, as well as content posted on it, can lead to economic and reputational damage as for ordinary users, as well as for companies. The purposes of this master's thesis are: defining the terminological base of the topic in question; forming a comprehensive understanding of the features of the protection of various objects in social media, as well as identifying issues associated with their protection. For this, the following tasks are identified: studying existing approaches to defining the concept and key characteristics of social media; analyzing legislation, as well as judicial practice related to the regulation of issues related to the activities of social media; assessing the possibility of applying legislation in the field of Intellectual Property to accounts on a social media, user-generated content (UGC), hashtags, usernames (group names), Vanity URL and defining how to protect them. In this work, the author has come to the conclusion that the existing legislation and law enforcement practice provide very broad opportunities for copyright holders to protect their rights to accounts and groups on a social media. Also, the emergence of user-generated content has created new challenges for legislation in the field of Intellectual Property. Issues related both to the registration of designations with a hashtag and the legitimate use of someone else's trademark as part of a hashtag and options for protection in case of infringement of rights to the username (group name) and Vanity URL were investigated. We also analyzed the possibility of qualifying a social media as the owner of the exclusive right to the user database.