The Pop Corporation

Time to work out a sad dance routine for duets with strangers while a sped-up version of a song plays, because it’s all going off at TikTok. Now, seeing as social media has been equal parts brilliant and awful over the years, it’s difficult to know what to actually think about all this. Let’s work it out together shall we?

First off, those wise people (side-eye) in the US Congress have voted to pass a bill that effectively bans TikTok in the United States, unless the people who own TikTok – a Chinese company called ByteDance – sell it to someone else. We’re going to take a wild swing here and assume that US Congress would be very much okay if the company they sold it to just so happened to be a company within the borders of the United States.

The vote went 79/18 with the 79 ayes having it, so it’s very likely the Joe Biden will approve the whole thing, and has hinted as much in recent months. What will happen if ByteDance tell these yank bastards to cram it? Well, the long and short of it is that it’ll be removed from Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store – but only the the US. Now, anyone who owns an Android phone knows too well that there’s very easy ways of circumnavigating these things. As for iPhone owners? Well. You concentrate on useful discourse like thinking what colour the bubble in your message inbox is and mystifyingly refusing to use WhatsApp.

What’s all this about really? Well, our American cousins think that TikTok is being used to spy on the US by the Chinese government and they can see all that lovely data of all those US citizens. Millions of people use the app, so if that’s true, then that’s a lot of info to mine. By the same token, that’s millions of people who will be absolutely irritated at the government messing with their fun.

The USA aren’t the first to do this, mind you. India banned the app in January 2021 and the following year, Taiwan and Afghanistan followed suit. The UK aren’t looking at doing anything because the Conservative party are still using BlackBerry phones that can’t get TikTok on them. Either way, one thing that TikTok can rely on is the American courts who love drawing things out for as long as humanly possible, so at least legal folk will be getting paid very well for the inevitable appeals and the like.

The US government have been sneaking this TikTok ban through on the back of another bill relating to $95bn of foreign aid, which will in part go to Ukraine. TikTok have noted: “It is unfortunate that the House of Representatives is using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance to once again jam through a ban bill that would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans, devastate 7 million businesses, and shutter a platform that contributes $24 billion to the U.S. economy, annually.”

That’s not all that’s going on – someone called Trefuego who is a TikTok user – was sued by Sony and now has to pay upwards of $800,000 for using copyrighted material without permission. The music used was by a Japanese composer called Toshifumi Hinata. The suit says: “Trefuego simply stole Hinata’s musical composition and sound recording, using them without asking and without permission, all in flagrant violation of the United States Copyright Laws.”

“Trefuego’s infringing conduct has and continues to severely damage and diminish the market for Hinata’s works by falsely inferring that he endorses and/or supports Trefuego’s use of ‘Reflections’ in ‘90mh’.”

A federal judge backed this claim up and was ordered to cough up. As Trefuego put the song on Spotify too (duh), he was ordered to include Hinata in 50% of the royalties from streaming too. Of course, this comes on the back of Sony removing all of their music from the app, so it’s looking like TikTok’s successes are being matched with endless admin at the moment.

Cue high pitched oh no… oh no… oh no, no, no, no, no…