On Friday, trending mobile video app TikTok stated that it has hired attorney Erich Andersen from Microsoft for serving as the global general counsel of the company, reporting to president Alex Zhu.
Microsoft IP Chief Erich Andersen Hired By TikTok
Andersen was most recently chief intellectual property counsel of Microsoft, taking along the expertise in an area of main concern to TikTok as it builds out its music offerings.
Previous month, he declared his departure from the company in a LinkedIn post, after spending more than 20 years at the tech giant.
TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance that was founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming. This app is used for creating short lip-sync, comedy, as well as talent videos. The app was launched in the year 2017 for iOS and Android for markets that are outside of China.
The application let its users to make short music and lip-sync videos that are of 3 to 15 seconds along with short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds. This app is very popular in Asia, the United States, as well as other parts of the world.
After rolling user growth previous year, the company is now making a push to attract US advertisers, directing in-app shopping features as well as testing a “creator marketplace” for matching brands along with influencers.
But at the same time, the social marketing agencies also told Reuters previous month that some marketers are still cautious of possible copyright matters that might possibly arise from use of the music offerings of the app.
On Thursday, TikTok also stated that it had signed a deal for expanding its music library by joining with Merlin, a UK-based digital rights group that exchanges licensing on behalf of more than 20,000 self-regulating record labels as well as distributors.
As per to the data from research firm Sensor Tower, TikTok as well as its Chinese counterpart Douyin have been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times, comprising 680 million downloads in the year 2019.
