Facebook will improve the way it handles copyright infringement on videos uploaded to the social network. The company is building a new video matching technology that should improve how the social network detects when users share copyright protected content.
Facebook currently uses 'Automatic Content Recognition' from the company Audible Magic. This technology creates a fingerprint of content which is detected when someone uploads content to a customer of the company. If the fingerprint is detected, the Audible Magic system is able to determine the actual author of the content and take an appropriate action which can include blocking the content.
The technology appears to be insufficient to deal with all copyright violations on Facebook. Therefore the social network has announced it will improve on both the technology and the procedures that allow content owner to report violating content.
With an own content recognition platform, Facebook hopes to tailor even more to content creator's wishes. In a blog the social network writes, "to this end, we have been building new video matching technology that will be available to a subset of creators. This technology is tailored to our platform, and will allow these creators to identify matches of their videos on Facebook across Pages, profiles, groups, and geographies."
The large scale of Facebook also makes that large numbers of videos are uploaded every day. The new tool should deal with that, "our matching tool will evaluate millions of video uploads quickly and accurately."
When the system detects copyright violations it allows publishers to report them, so the social network can remove the violating video.
Many video creators have complained to Facebook. Their revenue is mainly generated by advertisements on Youtube. When the same video is downloaded and uploaded to Facebook that revenue stream disappears. Especially when a video goes viral, the content creator isn't paid for the views.
