John Green holds an enviable in-house role for IP enforcement enthusiasts. As TikTok’s Global IP Counsel for Platform Governance, Enforcement, and Protection, he guides one of the world’s most closely watched platforms, safeguarding IP for 1.5 billion monthly active users while fueling growth. “I see the legal department as the guardian of the company’s ethics,” John shares. “You need to partner with the business to be effective, but you still have to stay true to that legal role.”
The fire burns
If the house where John lived with his parents had not burned down when he was 12, his life might have gone in a completely different direction. Before the future IP attorney had entered his teens, he was confronted with how important a lawyer’s work can be.
One night, John awoke to smoke, filling his family’s home. His father rushed everyone outside, and the family stood in the street watching the house burn to the ground. In the months that followed, they found themselves in the middle of litigation involving the insurance company, the fire department, and the home builders over construction defects.
The family’s attorney was the first lawyer John ever met. As an Ivy League law graduate, he made a lasting impression and showed John career paths he hadn’t imagined. “I didn’t know what discovery or a deposition was, I didn’t know anything about the legal profession,” John recalls. “Watching him represent us opened my eyes to new possibilities.”
Law didn’t seem like the obvious choice for a kid from a construction family who grew up working on job sites. John’s mother encouraged him toward medicine, but chemistry and calculus soon steered him away. A pivotal conversation with his father and grandfather shifted his view of law. “They told me, ‘If you know the law, you don’t have to rely on someone else to tell you what it is. You can answer the questions yourself,” John explains.
That idea was stuck. John applied to law school not because he intended to practice law, but because he wanted to understand it. His real plan at the time was to become a sports agent.
From sports to the small screen
John’s passion for sports runs deep. He played several sports in high school and took up rugby in college, so becoming a sports agent felt like a natural way to stay connected to athletics. After law school, he joined a leading sports agency and experienced both the glamorous and gritty sides of the business. “If you have a client athlete who approaches their career as a professional, you don’t have to tell them to go to practice or hit the gym,” John notes. “But many young athletes haven’t yet learned how to be professionals, and I realized pretty quickly that the challenge would be tough to overcome in light of my own lack of experience at the time.”
A senior agent who was an attorney encouraged John to shift toward traditional law, so he launched a law practice with a friend. Early on, they landed purposeful work, including assignments for DIRECTV. As work from DIRECTV increased, the company offered John a role he couldn’t refuse; even his partner urged him to accept it.
Back then, DIRECTV had just over six million customers and operated much like a well-funded startup. It encouraged employees to embrace new challenges. John found a great mentor in a retired FBI agent who led with trust and gave him room to grow. “He let me jump into matters even when I didn’t have prior experience because he trusted I would figure it out,” John recalls. “I eventually got comfortable being uncomfortable, which changed my fear of failure and led me to see failures as opportunities to be better.”
That lesson, the idea of treating failure as a launchpad, became central to his leadership philosophy. It prepared him for the next chapter, when he left DIRECTV to join the Motion Picture Association (MPA).
At the MPA, John built a new program focused on working with online platforms to disrupt global piracy and protect member studios’ IP. Over five years, he worked with technology companies around the world, learning how they approached content moderation, enforcement, and their relationships with rights holders. “The MPA asked me to help develop ways to work with online platforms to break up these piracy networks,” John explains. “We explored different approaches to protect the members’ IP rights.”
The next challenge
By late 2023, John felt ready for the next challenge. “What intrigued me was being on the platform side instead of the rights-holder side. I wanted to see how things really work behind the scenes on the other side,” John remarks.
He joined TikTok in December 2023, just a few months after TikTok Shop launched in the US and right before major ban litigation resumed in early 2024. TikTok Shop is an in-app marketplace where users can browse and buy products without leaving the app. It gives brands and creators the ability to sell or promote items through shoppable videos, livestreams, and a Shop tab. The timing might have made a more cautious lawyer pause. “At the start of 2024, I remember asking myself, ‘What did I get myself into?’” he reflects.
Instead, the experience reinforced the importance of resilience, a quality John values in himself and throughout TikTok’s culture. “Despite the ban on litigation, the attacks and challenges, the company continued to thrive and grow. We’ve reached a successful resolution to the litigation, and now we’re ready to do even more,” John points out. He describes teams that stay focused on improving the platform while the legal process unfolds.
Today, John tackles complex IP issues spanning North and South American teams. He ensures consistent governance standards across markets while adapting to changing laws and expectations.
Going above and beyond
John sees innovation and ethics as complementary, not competing. “In fact, when done well, they actually reinforce each other,” he observes. His IP team proves this by building foundational processes that exceed minimum legal requirements.
John has improved foundational IP workflows, such as note-and-takedown reporting, escalation paths, and rights-holder tools. TikTok goes further with proactive moderation, which is not required by law in the US, but rights owners and regulators want it. He shares that his team works hard to meet stakeholders where they are and to understand their needs.
That proactive posture is increasingly backed by scale. Between July 2023 and July 2024, TikTok’s IP Protection Centre helped permanently deactivate 4,804 TikTok Shop stores for IP violations and proactively blocked more than five million products from going live. In the same period, it removed approximately 800,000 videos and livestreams for IP infringements and permanently revoked selling permissions for more than 30,000 creators. As of 2024, TikTok Shop had more than 1,400 IP specialists across Southeast Asia, Europe, and the US focused on these issues.
Between January 2025 and June 2025, over 40 million products were proactively rejected from being listed on TikTok Shop for IPR violations. More than 2 million products were detected by TikTok and taken down for IPR violations after being listed and more than 530K videos and LIVE streams by TikTok Shop creators were removed for IPR infringement. In addition, TikTok processed nearly 500K requests through the Intellectual Property Protection Centre (IPPC), a one-stop integrated platform for TikTok Shop products. Since its inception, the IPPC has grown to include more than 7,000 unique rightsholders who have submitted notice and takedown requests associated with thousands of trademarks.
Resilience embodied
John’s resilience comes from both professional and personal challenges. Near the end of his time at DIRECTV and before joining the MPA, he battled against a rare bacterial infection that required more than 30 surgeries over five years. For long stretches, he couldn’t play the sports he loved. “Going through that made me even more determined to be active,” he confides. “Even if it’s just jumping rope or playing with my kids in the neighborhood.” Today, he says that health scare is well behind him, almost hard to believe it ever happened.
That experience, along with his early years and mentorships, sharpened his judgment, a quality he stresses when mentoring younger lawyers. “You have to be comfortable being uncomfortable,” he says. “You are often making informed decisions with incomplete information, and that requires good judgment and decisiveness.”
As TikTok expands its global reach and commerce ambitions, John’s job is to make sure the platform’s fast growth rests on a foundation that protects the rights of creators and brands worldwide. “I see our legal function as a force multiplier,” John adds. “When everyone feels trusted and empowered, legal becomes an enabler instead of a checkpoint. That builds trust and allows the company to move faster while still doing things the right way. That is what success looks like to me.”
