Facebook puts the boot into “freebooters”

It’s been a long time coming but Facebook has started making moves towards a video copyright infringement system along the lines of YouTube’s ContentID.

In a blog post, the company says that up until now they’ve relied on an audio matching technology and simple infringement claim reporting by copyright holders but that some media companies have found this – unsurprisingly – insufficient to keep track of their assets being illegally uploaded to Facebook pages.

So now a new system’s being developed that uses automated video matching to scan uploaded videos against a database of copyright material and instantly flag it as in breach. The tech’s in beta at the moment with just a small group of content creators “including media companies, multi-channel networks and individual video creators” says Facebook.

They say it’ll be extended to more content owners in the future and that they’re committed to making it work.

Whether it’ll cause the same howls of anguish as YouTube’s over-eager ContentID which permits seemingly almost anyone to claim copyright even on material they don’t actually own – we have our own experience of this – remains to be seen but crossed fingers that they do a better job.