Facebook may be YouTube‘s new rival for the most-consumed video platform on the web, but the social media site is still struggling with many of the problems that plagued YouTube in its early days. One big stopping block: policing copyright infringement.
Successful YouTubers say unauthorized uploads of their videos to Facebook are a big problem, and the site doesn’t give them adequate tools to identify and prevent infringement. Last week, the community’s objections crystallized into a Medium post by influential YouTuber Hank Green, creator and host of educational channels like SciShow and Crash Course (along with his brother John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars). Green called out Facebook for failing to verify uploaded videos or adequately enforce takedown requests from rights-holders.
“It’s a little inexcusable that Facebook, a company with a market cap of $260 billion, launched their video platform with no system to protect independent rights holders,” he wrote. “It wouldn’t be surprising if Facebook was working on a solution now which they can roll out conveniently after having made their initial claims at being the biggest, most important thing in video.”
Though Facebook is only in the very early stages of monetizing its video content, it’s expected to eventually pursue marketers’ desire to be associated with premium publisher content, the same way YouTube has. But to do that, Facebook will have to prove to marketers — as YouTube has — that it can provide a reliably brand-safe environment. One thing no brand wants is for their ad to show up next to pirated content.
In addition to Green, popular YouTubers like Devin Supertramp, Grant Thompson (The King of Random) and Destin Sandlin (SmarterEveryDay) have charged that Facebook is rife with video content that’s been copied over from YouTube without creators’ permission. According to a recent article from Slate, so-called “freebooted” videos are often posted by innocent fans wanting to share it with their friends, but they can also be deliberately ripped off by sketchy publishers looking to capitalize on successful YouTubers’ audiences to build profile and traffic to their pages.
Any pageviews racked up by a freebooted video aren’t tracked by the legitimate creator, which for YouTubers can translate to a major monetary loss. One unauthorized video identified by the Wall Street Journal drew 112 million views on Facebook over the last 90 days, making it the second-highest performing video on the site for that period. (Facebook removed the video after the WSJ wrote about it last week.)
Rachel Cooper, the Canadian vlogger behind the popular YouTube channel Rachhloves, told Marketing she hasn’t experienced any problems with other users uploading her videos to Facebook, but said she sees protecting copyright material as paramount to Facebook establishing itself as a player in the video market.
“To the extent that copyrighted material is being posted improperly, there can only be so much before the outcry grows loud enough that they will be forced to take action,” Cooper said. “With original content being as important as it is, any platform that hopes to succeed in the way YouTube has won’t get there by leeching other people’s work. Proper policing isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the only way to be seen as a legitimate player in the space.”
While YouTube shares profit with content creators and provides popular vloggers with studio space, advertising support and other perks, Facebook has yet to foster that kind of support system for content creators. Because it’s not sharing profits, few established YouTubers are using Facebook as a platform for their videos.
“Right now, Facebook remains an information-and-connection service with my viewers,” Cooper said. “As a video sharing service I haven’t seen any demand from my viewers to make my content available there, and without a revenue sharing program in place (yet) there’s no incentive for me to put my content there if it’s not where my fans want to watch.”
But other YouTubers, like Green and Sandlin, say the lack of incentive for them to cross-publish their content to YouTube creates a big opportunity for freebooters to step in and claim that content as their own. Since YouTubers can’t check Facebook for infringing content — there’s no way to do even a cursory check, since Facebook doesn’t have a newsfeed search function — many YouTubers may not even be aware their content has been reposted.
A root cause of the problem is Facebook privileges video that’s been natively uploaded over embedded links from YouTube. When a casual Facebook user posts a link to YouTube content, Facebook shows a standard preview, rather than the autoplay preview it shows for natively uploaded video. Perhaps more importantly, native video shows up more often in users’ newsfeeds, which Facebook says happens organically, because users are more likely to engage with an autoplay preview than a static one.
Back in 2007, YouTube implemented a claim system called Content ID that identifies copyrighted material as it’s uploaded and lets rightsholders request that it be taken down. They can opt to earn a percentage of the content’s ad revenues Content ID more-or-less solved the issue of piracy (though it has caused a lot of other headaches for creators claiming their videos have been removed unfairly).
Facebook does have some copyright detection capabilities through its subscription to Audible Magic, a service that a lot of user-generated content sites use to find infringing material. However, as Green pointed out in his Medium post, Facebook doesn’t have the option to let creators monetize that content, since there’s no paid advertising on Facebook videos. Responding directly to Green on Medium, Facebook product manager Matt Pakes said the site is exploring further options to help rights-holders identify and manage potentially infringing content, adding that Facebook expects to have more to announce on the topic later in the summer.
