Facebook Admits it Might Have a Video Piracy Problem
Copyfight 2015-08-31
Summary:
There's a whole side issue here I don't have time to write about, relating to how Facebook has make itself as much of a walled garden as it can, thereby training people that they can't just link to other content, they have to put content into Facebook itself. That they follow this training with other peoples' (video) content isn't hugely surprising. But onward.
Today the company announced that it would begin limited roll-out of a "video matching" technology that would alert creators when matched content was found in a Facebook upload. That seems like a fair first step to me, but it leaves open a lot of questions.
First (OK, I have to go there) why is Facebook still encouraging people to upload videos rather than link to them? Second, what is the success rate of this matching technology, and what's its false positive rate? Third, does the technology have any idea of the difference between a clip (which might be argued to be fair use) and a full-on copy or very long grab, which are much more likely to be illegal copies? Fourth, why is this only being made available to "a small group of partners"? Some pigs are more equal than others, I guess.
On the third point, the BBC story claims that, "...the tool will be able to detect when small portions of stolen content are used in another video without permission." Which is exactly and entirely the wrong way to go about this. Small portions are exactly the kind of thing that are important to use for educational, critique, and other fair uses. If Facebook is going to waste peoples' times chasing after this sort of minima then resources are going to be diverted from the most damaging instances of bucket copying.
They say that the first step is admitting you have a problem. Awesome, step one complete. Now about that effective response...