A brand steals a creator’s video and uses it as an ad. Is that legal?

Lots of get-rich-quick dropshipping gurus on YouTube and TikTok have similar advice: To sell a product, you need good video ads. And if you want good raw video content to make into good video ads, you can just find what you need on social media. Countless tutorials show dropshippers scraping product review videos posted by customers. These customers bought the item from someone else, posted their experience on some social media site, and never gave consent for dropshippers to use their content. It may be common, but it’s still unethical.

And it’s also happening to creators.

Actually, it’s been happening to creators. Six years ago, HopeScope posted a video razzing the brands who’d stolen her content to promote their activewear. Back then, this phenomenon was less common, because brands had to scrub through long-form videos and do some editing to steal creators’ content for their own purposes.

But with the rise of short-form, short-form editing tools, and the ever-growing ecommerce deluge on TikTok, the internet has found …