Protect your content whilst maintaining availability – P. 1
This week, we will discuss how you can protect your content whilst still ensuring it is available to your users. You can still achieve this whilst maintaining online security and GDPR compliance. We’ll deep dive some copyright issues. We’ll first focus on a brand that moved to protect it’s copyright from coffee company Grenade Beverage Inc.
We’ll also discuss a case where GDPR compliance was severely threatened for Yahoo and it’s security team. We will also discuss how technology can enable your team to protect your content better, as a part of your digital strategy.
Start with context, many naturally worry about GDPR compliance
Depending on the nature of your organisation, the correct use of branding and materials tells your story. The improper representation of it, particularly where licenses are involved can also be very damaging to it. And of course, break your companies GDPR compliance can also prove very damaging to your brand. It is enough to give many professionals different degrees of headaches, sleeplessness and if you are very unlucky, the occasional lawsuit.
It is a horrendous position for any organisation, and yourself as a professionals, to possibly find yourself in. Our heart goes out too many. Who seemingly through no fault of their own, find themselves breaching regulations, at great organisational or personal cost.
Grumpy Cat Ltd. left grumpy with it’s partner’s content strategy
As you would wish to protect your content and agreement, Grumpy Cat had a reason to be as such with one of it’s partners. A famous breach and break down in relations, ironically, occurred over an agreement associated to the internet sensation ‘Grumpy Cat’. The Guardian and the BBC reported at the time, a deal had been struck by US coffee company Grenade Beverage Inc and Grumpy Cat Ltd. Such a deal allowed for the team at the coffee company to sell branded iced coffee beverages, aptly called ‘grumppucinos’.
In turn the resulting case claimed copyright infringement which was worth over £500K in favour of Grumpy Cat Ltd. It became clear that the coffee chain had gone on to create numerous related branded assets such as T-Shirts and bags of coffee, much to the chagrin of Grumpy Cat . In turn the team went on to sell these at branch level in addition to the original agreed beverages they had secured agreement on.
Why did this copyright breach occur?
There are a range of reasons that this breach may have occurred. It could just be a misunderstanding of the agreement, communication issues and so on. After all, mistakes can happen at a human level. How assets were controlled and provided to relevant stakeholders centrally, could also have been at fault, resulting in a massive cost to the company. Grumpy Cat Ltd were hopefully a bit more joyous about the outcome after the fact. However, the need for systems and processes to aide both sides was critical and will prevent teams facing such ordeals in the future.
Yahoo and it’s ordeal with GDPR breaches
You will be aware of someone who has suffered a GDPR breach. And you may also be likely to know of Yahoo’s ordeal. It is believed to have had compromised all 3 billion of its users. This included names, email addresses, dates of birth and telephone numbers. As reported by the CSO, which reports on the 18 biggest data breaches of the 21st century, this resulted in a markdown. In total the markdown resulted in the company losing $350M off of its sales price during sell-off negotiations in 2017.
It is believed that the breach was delivered using simple hacking techniques. And whilst the cause for it could have many reasons, a lesson was clear. That lesson was that despite this large internet provider being so successful in business, it was exposed due to it’s data security policies. Data policies that could have been resolved at a system level.
What can be done at a system level to offer more security?
Considering these events taking place in the industry, many digital system providers can do more in terms of security. This could include mechanisms which offer your team various forms of protection. All protections are designed to ensure your team doesn’t face the same risks witnessed by other organisations. Typically such protections occur in response to breaches elsewhere. So, whilst none of us want to on the receiving end, the breach serves as a lesson/blueprint.
Some DAM systems can now offer you the following:
- Copyright protection: Any content uploaded is also checked in an automated way. This helps your team to ensure copyright infringements do not occur. In turn, nor is any defined confidential data contained within it.
- User management: What if you could control which users can access what? Well, you can. Content can classified in a tiered system when being uploaded, achieving the desired security measures.
- GDPR compliance: Some systems can now automatically update any data retrieval or management aspects of the system. This means a member of our software team has checked regulations and will automatically ensure the system complies. Where it doesn’t automatic updates will occur in the background, so you needn’t worry.
Protect your content and incorporate security into your DAM system
All management systems and protections, much is dependent on how managers then communicate and utilise these tools. However, if used enthusiastically digital asset management systems will dramatically reduce the likelihood of breaches. The DAM systems will also provide it in a more automized fashion. Find out more about these protections, mechanisms and other features that can help protect your organisation. Read more on one of our latest blog posts.
