• by Alex Weprin , February 9, 2018

Content owners will have a new tool to fight copyright infringement on Instagram. The photo and video-sharing application this week added a tool that lets content owners scan uploaded videos to search for those infringing on protected material.

The tool, Facebook Rights Manager, comes from Instagram's parent company, and lets content owners upload content to the manager, which will automatically scan for posts that feature that content. if an infringing post is found, the tool lets owners block it, "monitor" it or send it to a manual review for later action.

"This update is something that rights owners have asked for, and builds on the the improvements we’ve made since introducing Rights Manager nearly two years ago," wrote Facebook head of product rights and music Fred Beteille in a blog post.

Instagram has become so popular with advertisers that competitor Snapchat has begun to offer free advertising to companies that buy space on Instagram, according to Recode. Snap has been monitoring Instagram and some other vertically driven applications, and offering potential advertisers free placements worth "hundreds of dollars" in the Snapchat app.