Facebook Puts 'Freebooters' On Notice

• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, April 28, 2017

Some publishers don’t think Facebook has done enough to fight “freebooting” when Page owners post copyright-protected video they don’t actually own.

In response, the social giant is improving its Rights Manager tool, including further automating the process of detecting and deleting stolen video. Since Facebook first launched the tool last year, rights owners have had to review video matches in a dashboard before taking action.

Now, they can instruct Facebook’s system to take specific actions whenever it finds matched content on its platform.

“Rights Manager now has four automatic match actions,” Xiaoyin Qu, a product manager at Facebook, notes in a new blog post. They include blocking matched content from being viewable on Facebook upon their uploading and allowing rights owners to claim a share of revenue generated if an ad runs in a piece of content that matches the rights owner’s reference file.

“We’re still early days with testing Ad Break, but this option may be something rights owners want to use in the future,” according to Qu.

Plus, the new Rights Manager allows matched content to remain viewable on Facebook, where the rights owner can monitor video metrics, while it can also send the match to a “Manual Review” tab to be reviewed and acted on at a later time.