Facebook moves to stamp out piracy with ‘video matching technology’
Facebook’s is using a tool that uses ‘video matching technology’ to better identify content uploaded by anyone other than the copyright holder.
Facebook says its long term goal is to provide a comprehensive video management system for publishers, vital if it is to position itself as an alternative to YouTube and court advertisers’ budgets.
However, content creators have complained of piracy. Most recently, American vlogger Hank Green accused Facebook of “lying, cheating and stealing”, saying it is purposefully slow to remove “freebooted” content, which is taken from YouTube and then uploaded natively to Facebook without the original creator’s permission. Facebook’s algorithm favours that native content over YouTube embedded videos.
Recent research from Ogilvy and Tubular Labs suggested as many as 725 of the 1,000 most popular Facebook videos in the first quarter of 2015 were ‘freebooted’.
In a blog post yesterday (27 August), Facebook admitted that third-parties “too frequently misuse content on Facebook.”
““It’s not fair to those who work hard to create amazing videos. We want creators to get credit for the videos that they own,” it said.
It has made attempts to combat piracy in the past. Videos uploaded to Facebook are run through the Audible Magic system, which uses audio fingerprinting technology to identify and prevent unauthorised videos from appearing on the platform alongside reporting tool for content owners.
However, new video matching technology will allow creators to identify matches of their videos on Facebook across Pages, profiles, groups, and geographies.
“Our matching tool will evaluate millions of video uploads quickly and accurately, and when matches are surfaced, publishers will be able to report them to us for removal,” it claimed.
The tool should appease content creators for the time being, but Facebook promised this “is just the beginning” and it will continue to work on a more robust system that can match YouTube.