Former Microsoft IP chief joins TikTok
Social media platform TikTok has hired former Microsoft attorney Erich Andersen as vice president and global general counsel.
Andersen joined Microsoft in 1995 as an attorney, eventually becoming vice president and chief IP counsel in 2014.
He joins TikTok, owned by Chinese company Bytedance, at a time when the platform faces several copyright-related challenges.
The platform owes much of its popularity to users’ ability to feature songs in the videos they create and share on the platform.
Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”, one of the most popular songs of 2019 and recipient of three nominations at yesterday’s Grammy Awards, first gained popularity on TikTok.
But US rights owners have argued that TikTok is systematically infringing publishers’ copyright.
Last October, the US National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) wrote to senator Marco Rubio calling for a congressional investigation into TikTok’s alleged copyright violations.
David Israelite, president of the NMPA, said that “while some publishers have been able to negotiate with TikTok to license their catalogs, a large part of [the publishing] industry does not have agreements in place, meaning numerous works continue to be used unlawfully as the platform’s popularity grows exponentially”.
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