My reel or TikTok was reposted without permission

Reporting on TikTok

TikTok takes copyright reports through its form at tiktok.com/legal/report/Copyright. You identify your original, give the link to each reposted video, and make the statements the law requires.

• ✓TikTok may share details of the report, such as the name of the copyright owner, with the account that posted the video.
• ✓TikTok warns that misuse of the form can lose the filer access to it. A report on something that is not yours, or that is clearly fair use, is the kind of misuse it means.

Reporting on Instagram and Facebook

Instagram's copyright reports start from its help contact page and lead to Meta's intellectual-property reporting form, which also covers Facebook. Meta says it regularly gives the person who posted the rights owner's name, the reporter's email address and the details of the report, and that when an authorized representative files it gives the name of the client. Use a business email, not a personal one.

The rules are the same as on TikTok: one link per post or reel, your original identified, and the sworn statements completed by you or by an agent you have authorized. A reel cross-posted to Facebook is a second item on the same form.

What to gather before you report

1. 1

   Your original post

   Its link, and the date it went up. The platform can see your upload date; quote it anyway.

2. 2

   Every reposted link

   Open each one and copy the post URL, not the profile URL. Screen-record or save the post in case it is edited or deleted.

3. 3

   Your raw file

   The original footage from your phone or camera, with its metadata. A repost may be lower resolution and cropped; your file is the most direct evidence of who shot it.

4. 4

   Anything you licensed

   If you ever gave a brand or a page permission to repost, find out what you agreed to. Reporting a use you licensed is the quickest way to lose a dispute.

Cropped, flipped, re-captioned

Repost accounts edit what they take, partly to look original and partly to slip past automatic matching. The usual changes are a crop that removes your handle, a mirror flip, a speed change, a new caption, music laid over the top, or your clip cut into a longer compilation. None of that makes the video theirs. A flipped copy of your footage is still your footage.

It does make the report harder for a reviewer to assess at a glance, so do the comparison for them. Give the timestamp in their video where your clip starts and ends, say what was changed, and point to your original. A reviewer handling a queue decides fastest when the match is obvious within the first few seconds of reading.

If they added substantial material of their own around your clip, such as commentary, a tutorial or a reaction, look again at fair use before filing. Short clips used to make a point about them are where reports get rejected and where counter-notices come from. A copy with only music and a caption added is not that.

Repost accounts that keep doing it

Every US platform that relies on the safe harbor has to have a policy for repeat infringers. That is why reports matter even when an account seems untouchable: a run of valid reports against one account is what those policies act on. Whether and when an account is removed is the platform's decision, not yours and not ours.

The same video can appear on several repost accounts and on more than one platform at once. Each copy is its own report. That is where it gets tedious, and where it starts to make sense to hand the list over.

If they put it back

An account can respond with a counter-notice. The statute then allows the post to return after 10 to 14 business days unless you start a court case. A repost account may not, because a counter-notice requires them to give their real name and address and consent to a US court's jurisdiction. If one does, we tell you the day it arrives, and whether to go further is a question for a lawyer.