Facebook ‘freebooting’ problem is creating a lot of bad press for the firm. For example, a new video about the problem has surfaced, and this time it includes screenshots of emails that the company sent to YouTube star Ethan Klein, says a report from Business Insider. ‘Freebooting’ is the term used for the practice of stealing videos to repost them on other platforms.
Freebooting problem a big loss for video creators
Over the last year or so, Facebook’s native video platform has grown at an impressive rate with Facebook claiming 8 billion video views per day.
But amid all these big numbers, the social networking giant also had to face criticism from YouTube and Vine users over allowing its users to copy their content and repost it without adequate consequence.
This leads to the fury of the creators because they have to bear double loss – the loss of intellectual property and the loss of ad revenue that they could have made through their video views on YouTube. Recently, an animated video that shows how Facebook is stealing billions of views went completely viral.
Klein, who has a comedy YouTube channel ‘Ethan and Hila,’ described in a post how another Facebook user downloaded a video from his channel and then uploaded it in entirety into Facebook’s native video unit, where it garnered more views than the original one.
Is Facebook really keen to address the issue?
Klein reported this to the social network, the company expressed its inability to do anything, and suggested him to follow up with the person responsible for stealing and uploading his content from YouTube. Only after Business Insider reached out to Facebook over the matter, did the social network pulled down the offending video from its site
In an email to BI, a company spokesperson said, “Our team deals with a large volume of reports every day, and we strive to promptly remove infringing videos. In this case, we made a mistake.” Klein says he has not heard from the company as of yet.
Facebook has tried to address the issue by using a system called Audible Magic. Repeat offenders are banned from posting by this system that uses ‘audio fingerprinting’ to identify stolen content before it’s uploaded. The social networker also encourages the use of its tools for flagging copyright-protected material. The company is also working on building another video-matching technology that has been rolled out to a subset of creators for initial testing.
