Content owners who post original content to Facebook can now worry a little less about their material being used without authorization by others. Yesterday, the company announced a new tool, Rights Manager, that will curtail “freebooting,” or the practice of taking original videos from Facebook and reposting them.
Rights Manager is built on video-matching technology that Facebook developed over the past year or so. The technology allows content owners to maintain libraries of protected clips, while a built-in dashboard lets them check for instances of identical videos being posted elsewhere. The dashboard can filter videos based on time, the dates posted or how many times they’ve been viewed.
Once an infringing video is uncovered, the creator of the video can either request that the material be taken down immediately, or allow the clip to be reposted under certain conditions, such as being viewed on certain sites, a certain number of times or as an excerpt.
Works with Live Video
Facebook had previously responded to take-down requests by creators of original video content, but the process often took several days. The company is now promising to take action immediately — even if the video being infringed is presented via its Facebook Live video stream.
“Video publishers and media companies can also provide reference streams of live content so that we can check live video on Facebook against those reference streams in real time,” product manager Analisa Tamayo Keef and engineering manager Lior Ben-Kereth wrote on the company blog.
Publishers can upload content libraries and publish live videos to be used as references for Rights Manager to check against, including videos they are not sharing publicly on Facebook. Rights Manager then monitors for potential infringement of that content across Facebook.
The technology also lets content owners whitelist specific Pages or profiles to allow them to use their copyrighted content. Publishers can specify Pages or profiles that have permission to publish their protected content without being monitored for potential infringement.
Others Have Tried It
The Rights Manager API, which Facebook said is coming soon, will improve bulk uploading for publishers and let media management companies support partners in managing, monitoring and protecting their content across Facebook, the company said.
Some other video content providers, including YouTube and Viacom, have made similar attempts to enforce copyright on original material they host. One difference is that YouTube’s Content ID allows owners to make money from re-uploads by billing the organizations that post them, a wrinkle that Facebook’s Rights Manager doesn’t have. That could mean that content owners will have to still put in the work of tracking down freebooters via Facebook’s Rights Manager without any financial gain.
Last year, Tubular Labs, which tracks all video content activity online, looked at the 1,000 most popular Facebook videos during a three-month period. It turned out that 725 were freebooted re-uploads that garnered a total of 17 billion views.
Image Credit: Facebook.
