Facebook will better detect freebooting in videos

Facebook will more emphatically detect copyright infringement in videos on the social network. The company is implementing a new system to make it faster and better to recognize when users publish copyrighted content.

In a blog post, Facebook announces that the company wants to better combat the phenomenon called freebooting in the future. Currently, the social network uses Audible Magic technology to determine from the audio whether a video is original or copied from somewhere else. Facebook now wants to improve this system. The algorithms for recognizing copyright violations must be tightened, but also the procedures for reporting such infringing content to Facebook must become more efficient in the future.

Facebook is also going to make its own software that recognizes videos. A select group of content creators get access to the tools on Facebook that make it possible for them to see which pages, profiles, groups and locations their videos are on. The tool must quickly and accurately approve millions of videos, and publishers can subsequently report videos to Facebook. The tool will soon enter a small closed beta test with a number of companies, channels and creators.

Several video creators on YouTube are complaining that their videos are being downloaded from Google’s video site and uploaded to Facebook. The owners of the YouTube channels do not earn anything from this, but Facebook itself and the uploader do. In some cases, YouTube users are missing out on millions of views. It is unclear whether the measures taken by Facebook only recognize a copied video from within Facebook or whether they will also be able to make the link with YouTube videos.