Facebook is making it easier to stop video theft. On Thursday, the social media platform announced changes to the Rights Manager system that allows business pages to automate a number of actions if duplicate content is discovered, including blocking the video outright.
The changes come as part of the Rights Manager, a system launched a year ago that detects identical video content, either as a whole or in smaller clips and allows the page administrator to take a number of different actions, including reporting copyright infringement or “white listing” other pages that have permission to use the footage. Rights Manager, available only to Pages after an application is accepted, shows a database of uploaded videos along with the number of new matches or times the video is found on another page, allowing an admin to review and determine which action to take.
The latest update allows page owners to choose to skip the review process and automatically take an action when a duplicate video is found. Those actions include blocking the video entirely and monitoring the videos metrics. In the future, those auto options will even include claiming a portion of the revenue in Ad Break. Facebook is still testing the Ad Break feature that allows ads to be inserted into videos while the creator earns a portion of that revenue, but the feature has launched to a select number of pages for testing.
Users can also determine a set of conditions to determine which automatic action should be taken. That means users can decide to block a video that uses more than one minute of identical footage, for example, but will leave it alone if the duplicate content is just a few seconds. Additional conditions include where the viewer is located, whether the identical content is video or audio, if the video was shared by a business page or personal profile and whether the video was shared publicly or privately.
The new feature started rolling out to some users yesterday, with global availability expected in the next few weeks.
