Understanding IP Matters: How a Unique Influencer-Educator is Attracting Diverse Audiences to IP Awareness and Ethics

Helping audiences understand what intellectual property is, why it’s valuable, and how to use it is an ongoing challenge. The perception that intellectual property is only for attorneys and big companies is widespread. Of course, while that impression is grounded in reality, it’s also inaccurate. At its best, IP helps level the playing field for smaller entities.

What can be done to make IP education more relevant and interesting to more people? One solution is to have educators who are not practicing attorneys teach about intellectual property. They are generally able to speak more freely and with less concern for the technical aspects of the law.

Another solution is to take advantage of social media, which is where so many of us already spend so much of our time. The third is to situate IP within its natural context — business. While most of us will never file a patent application, we interact with trademarks and copyright daily in the form of brands, entertainment and art.

Primarily using TikTok, Professor Casey, as she’s known on the platform, has proven it’s entirely possible to make learning about IP highly entertaining and engaging. The information science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has made more than 1,000 short form videos about tech, ethics, law, internet, academia and IP.

With more than 100,000 followers and 3 million likes on TikTok alone, Casey Fiesler is a unique resource. Bruce Berman spoke with the talented creator about her social media success for Episode 3 of Season 3 of his podcast, Understanding IP Matters.

Key Responses

How do you choose topics to make short-form videos about?

Casey Fiesler: “That’s a really good question. Sometimes, it’s what people are talking about.Things that are newsworthy or  that are in the public interest right now. For example, after the Barbie movie came out, I made several videos about Mattel and Barbie-related IP cases. I made a video about Orly Lobel’s book about the Barbie versus Bratz lawsuit. That was really interesting.

I also have this backlog of things that I just think are interesting to talk about. Something will occur to me, and [I’ll think], ‘oh, I’ve never made a video about that.’

Sometimes, it will be because of content that I see on TikTok. For example, a couple of years ago, I had several videos about trademark genericide go really viral on TikTok, and it started because I stitched a video of someone who works at LEGO (or someone who was a LEGO expert or something like that) explaining why you do not call these ‘LEGOs,’ you call them ‘LEGO bricks.’

So, I made a video explaining what genericide is. Then I made a video about brands that are no longer trademarked, and then I made a video about brands that you think aren’t trademarked, but [are]. People found that very interesting.

I think there are so many funny little IP things that are just interesting to tell people about. Genericide — when a brand loses their trademark because it no longer serves the purpose of identifying that brand — is one of those….

A lot of IP education [especially in the early Internet days] was [conveying] ‘don’t steal.’ It wasn’t teaching you what IP is and what copyright is and what it meant.”

It seems there’s a general dismissiveness towards IP. 

Casey Fiesler: “I do see a lot of push-back against copyright and trademark. Some of it I think is general pushback against capitalism.

For copyright, in particular, it’s because people are seeing a lot of this very overreaching kind of stuff…. Copyright lasts way too long….There is no need for copyright terms to be as long as they are. The degree to which some very large copyright owners are protecting their copyright, people are seeing as ridiculous… which causes [a sentiment of], ‘oh this is bad.’

Obviously, copyright is not bad. IP is not bad.”

The future: What are we looking at with regard to people’s awareness of IP rights and infringement?

Casey Fiesler: “The two things that I think are going to be changing with respect to this kind of stuff have both come up [during this conversation.]

One has to do with more people becoming content creators. Copyright is more important to them in ways that it wouldn’t have necessarily been before. When I first started researching this stuff in the mid 2000s, I kept writing this thing in papers that was like, ‘When the Copyright Act was written in the 1970s, copyright was not something that mattered to anyone but lawyers and professional artists.’

But now it matters to everyone, because we’re all sharing content constantly. Now that we actually have this kind of thing in the middle — which is people who are more amateur, but still sharing content that they might want to make money from — copyright is more important to more people now.

The other thing is artificial intelligence. It’s not even just the training data. It’s also copyright of things generated by AI. I think that’s going to be huge…. The Copyright Office has said that something generated by AI cannot be copyrighted…. What constitutes human authorship?”

More Highlights 

Listen to the entire episode to hear more of Professor Casey’s insights about IP education and social media, including the role of ethics; the pros and cons of different platforms for creators, including monetization; how understanding copyright benefits creators; and much more.