Facebook launches video Rights Manager to combat freebooting

After eight months in development, Facebook has launched its video Rights Manager to stop the “freebooting” plague.

Freebooting is when Business Pages and celebrity commentators take videos without permission off YouTube, television or other sites and post them on Facebook as their own for personal gain.

This copyright-infringing practice lets them to build their own audience and engagement through millions of views, and sell ads on the back of these, while the original publishers lose out.

Facebook gets 8 billion views a day. It is not known how much of these are re-uploaded. But a study by ad agency Ogilvy and video analytics firm Tubular Labs found that 72.5% of the top 1000 Facebook videos in one specific month were from other sources.

One oft-quoted example of the loss from freebooting is YouTube creator Devin Graham who through his production company Devin Super Tramp makes a series of live action recreations of building to building jumps from the Assassin’s Creed game. They cost $50,000 each and get tens of millions of views. But last year, these only received 2.5 million views on his YouTube channel … because fans were also seeing it on Facebook. The freebooters did not contribute a cent to the videos’ production costs.

Multichannel network Fullscreen’s CEO George Strompolos complained that illegal versions of his content on Facebook numbered 50 million.

After multiple complaints that the California-based Facebook was turning a blind eye because re-posted videos were making it a lot of money, the company moved last August to protect creator protection.

It announced it was coming up with an admin tool for Pages. Rights Manager is similar to YouTube’s own copyright flagging Content ID but is different in some ways.

Freebooting was rampant on YouTube too, until Viacom sued it for $1 billion in 2007 for copyright infringement. YouTube says it spent “tens of millions of dollars” developing Content ID and has made more than $1 billion in payments to more than 8,000 rights holders using the system. It also deletes a channel caught freebooting for the third time.

Rights Manager allows content owners to upload their videos and list which Pages it can be re-uploaded to. Rights Manager monitors these and has two options. It can automatically delete the illegal versions. Or it can notify the original publisher, and provide data as to where they came from, how much of the video was used, and how many views they had, and allow the publisher to take action.

A major difference between Rights Manager and Content ID is that the latter allows the original publisher to keep their content on the second site but demand that they get a cut from any money made by the third-party versions.

Rights Manager offers a monitoring option for Live Video exists, making sure that people do not rebroadcast pay-per-view content, such as a concert or boxing match, for instance which is possible on Twitter’s Periscope.

Rights Manager is not open for public use yet, but owners of video content can already apply to join the program here.