15 ms·

Facebook’s Piracy Problem

439 points by wesd 11y ago

superuser2 11y ago
I don't understand how this is "Facebook's" piracy problem. It sounds like the British newspaper's piracy problem.
- brokentone 11y ago
  If the tooling isn't there for reporting. Youtube, for example, has worked really hard with Content ID to be able to automatically report and repoint infringing content.
  - dasil003 11y ago
    Not just that, but the fact that the content is unsearchable, and the fact that Facebook is profiting heavily from it as fuel for one of its latest "frictionless engagement" features is fairly damning. That's not to say Facebook isn't taking reasonable measures, but if you look how incentives are aligned it doesn't inspire confidence.
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    This may be the first post in the history of HN that isn't completely negative about content ID.
- psychometry 11y ago
  Because FB's infrastructure doesn't prevent piracy or offer creators ways of identifying it.
- spuz 11y ago
  If you don't understand by reading the article I highly recommend watching Sandalin's video about it.
001sky 11y ago
This title seems (a bit) like blaming the stock exchange for insider trading.
- belorn 11y ago
  Do the stock exchange earn money on insider trading? If not then thats a key difference when it comes to incentives and encouraging such activities.
  - avn2109 11y ago
    I'm not an expert, but I assume the exchange takes the same cut of the bid ask spread on an insider trade as it does on any other trade. So the answer to your question is an unequivocal yes.
mosquito242 11y ago
This is super interesting - it seems like facebook's more likely to get away with it too because the people being ripped off are smaller independent YouTube Channels. It seems like YouTube's main incentive to build out copyright infringement tools was all of the record labels that had songs being uploaded and re-uploaded on the platform. I can see YouTube getting really aggressive in fighting FB on this legally, because they need to defend their own content providers before they move to Facebook (or start uploading to both facebook/youtube).
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  The content producers should file DMCA notices with the hosts if they don't want their content there. It seems like it would be in the interest of producers to register their works in well-known repositories so that viewers can have a high degree of confidence that the content they are viewing has the claimed provenance.
  - deathhand 11y ago
    If youtube could provide DMCA tools to the everyman then things will get interesting. If Google could tell me when and where my video is being pirated I could see this be a HUGE boon to their content distribution system. Everyone would want to distribute with them.
  - bsder 11y ago
    > The content producers should file DMCA notices with the hosts if they don't want their content there. If you even know it's there. Is a Facebook video with a million view likely to cross your particular feed? Especially if it's in another country? Especially if someone took pains to remove identifying characteristics? > It seems like it would be in the interest of producers to register their works in well-known repositories YouTube seems like a pretty well known repository to me ...
- tedunangst 11y ago
  YouTube will have a hard time fighting this directly, since they don't own the content. Much like craigslist couldn't directly go after 3taps for copying, but only the scraping. And in this case, Facebook isn't doing the scraping.
ericras 11y ago
Like usual, currently Facebook doesn't think they have much of a "problem" at all. It only becomes a problem if someone calls them out on it - probably in a court.
Mithaldu 11y ago
It sounds to me like part of the problem is that the people making popular videos don't share them on facebook themselves, which results in the modern internet native's primary reaction to media being unavailable in their preferred venue and at their preferred comfortability level: Piracy. Sure, you can fight back by appealing to the public about facebook's evility, or by spending lots of resources in legal action. Or you can roll with the punches and figure out the myriad ways in which even the currently broken facebook system can work for you.
- Jare 11y ago
  How would those videos monetize for the author when posted on Facebook? The article says Facebook's ad revenue sharing is in the works but not quite there yet .
  - scott_s 11y ago
    Probably not directly at the moment, but they could do something similar to what the people who are ripping them off are doing: create a FB page for exposure, and hope that exposure turns into views on their YouTube channel.
    - bsder 11y ago
      But why should I go watch the video on YouTube when I just watched it on Facebook? Even better, the Facebook video doesn't have ads.
      - tedunangst 11y ago
        The classic pirate answer is that after you torrent an album to try it out, you go buy a copy to support the artist. So after you watch the Facebook video, you'd go watch it again on YouTube to support the creator.
        bsder 11y ago
        And we all know how well that worked for the music industry.
kevando 11y ago
Didn't youtube start the same way?
- teraflop 11y ago
  The article touches on that: > Maybe this is just a stage of development for online video platforms: grow first, then cover your legal bases. Some might even see poetic justice in the potential disruption of YouTube’s business by an upstart that plays a little faster and looser when it comes to copyright enforcement.
- larrys 11y ago
  Sure but from my understanding of the article youtube isn't really the aggrieved party it's the creators that are.
  - qq66 11y ago
    YouTube is an aggrieved party since they are losing money too, but there's far more popular sympathy for the individual creators.
- dasil003 11y ago
  Sure, but YouTube was a startup in a nascent industry.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  YouTube started under much different circumstances. Facebook doesn't really have an excuse.
- nnbvv 11y ago
  There's actually still quite a bit of piracy on Youtube. Channels that do this will often crop the video, or change the pitch of the audio, to avoid flagging from Youtube's piracy detection algorithm. For example, I saw the film Citizen 4 relabelled as something generic like "Surveillance Documentary" and it had millions of views.
sourthyme 11y ago
It seems like it would be easy for Facebook to support takedowns since it could remove the video from feeds.
- forgetsusername 11y ago
  >It seems like it would be easy for Facebook to support takedowns since it could remove the video from feeds. Why would they want to until they're somehow forced to? Much like all the fake accounts and associated "like" markets, there's zero incentive for them to correct the issues.
- edgarvaldes 11y ago
  >Facebook typically complies, they said—but often not until a day or two later, by which time the video’s virality has run much of its course. Two days, Sandlin told me, is “basically forever in Internet time.”
- jboggan 11y ago
  Takedowns suck. Content creators don't want that and people driving traffic to their page don't want that. The crucial thing about YouTube and ContentID is that you can leave the videos alone but choose to monetize (take all ad revenue) from a re-uploaded video instead of just showing a black box and a takedown notice. It works and it is seamless on YouTube but I don't know if Facebook has built anything similar. More interesting will be how Facebook and YouTube handle content exclusively uploaded on one platform or the other but re-uploaded cross-platform. Shameless plug: we (FullScreen) have a video uploader service that uploads to both platforms with several custom options such as staggered release on the two platforms or say putting a short preview clip on Facebook that links to the full video on (monetized) YouTube: http://www.fullscreen.com/2015/05/21/fullscreen-uploader-is-here/ http://www.fullscreen.com/2015/05/21/fullscreen-uploader-is-...
  - leephillips 11y ago
    "Takedowns suck." No, stealing (yes, stealing) people's work sucks. Unjustified takedown requests do suck (and what makes them suck so much is platforms' craven response to frivolous requests). But we're talking about real, willful infringement here. "Content creators don't want that" You probably shouldn't try to speak for all of us, because you are wrong.
willlma 11y ago
Ironically, at the end of the tattoo video that was pirated, Destin Sandlin, the host, is seen wearing [a shirt](http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Going-Science-T-Shirt-Scientists/dp/B006FCNWNY/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Going-Science-T-Shirt-Scientists...) that is a blatant rip off of an Randall Munroe's (XKCD) [shirt](http://store-xkcd-com.myshopify.com/products/try-science http://store-xkcd-com.myshopify.com/products/try-science).
- ljk 11y ago
  That always made me wonder, the people who sell shirts with logos/pop references shirts in mall booths, do they pay the artist a license fee to sell them?
  - sbarre 11y ago
    NOPE
  - bmelton 11y ago
    The people who sell the shirts? No. The people who manufacture the shirts? Yes, at least in theory.
  - forrestthewoods 11y ago
    They do if the copyright owner comes knocking. http://kotaku.com/the-maker-of-the-trollface-meme-is-counting-his-money-1696228810 http://kotaku.com/the-maker-of-the-trollface-meme-is-countin...
- hudj1jcnapru38 11y ago
  In case anyone hasn't seen Destin's videos (smarter every day), I'd like to mention that he's an incredibly interesting and engaging person who puts out really high quality content. If you're like me, and think of the pieces of shit that run the RIAA when you hear about piracy complaints... it's worth watching Destin and his videos to see a much more sympathetic actor. (Also, his big beef seems to be facebook's incentives to make money off those videos w/o giving him some... he's not talking about torrents specifically)
solidpy 11y ago
But is it Facebook or the magazine that ripped and modified the video the one at fault? Issue a DMCA to Facebook and sue the magazine for copyright infringement. And next time post it yourself.
- cjmcqueen 11y ago
  Really tough for a small creator to police without tools. I think the lack of tools is the real place where Facebook is going to see trouble.
- JusticeJuice 11y ago
  The problem with posting it yourself, is unless you've spent ages cultivating a fb page with heaps of followers, you won't get any traction or views at all. And posting it yourself won't stop a larger fb page taking it.
- JusticeJuice 11y ago
  The problem with posting it yourself, is unless you've spent ages cultivating a fb page with heaps of followers, you won't get any traction or views at all. And posting it yourself won't stop a larger fb page taking it.
- lips 11y ago
  They're both at fault, to varying degrees, explicitly or implicitly. Destin mentions in his "intro to freebooting" video his various attempts to contact Facebook regarding the piracy, and that it was only removed after a Twitter campaign led by his viewers: https://youtu.be/L6A1Lt0kvMA?t=3m49s https://youtu.be/L6A1Lt0kvMA?t=3m49s I don't know much, or have any experience with DMCA, but it's my impression that if there's a copyright violation on Youtube, the video can be taken down very quickly, and the burden of proof is then placed on the uploader to get it back up.
dimino 11y ago
Why can't YouTube users just send a DMCA takedown notice to Facebook? If a video makes someone a decent amount of money, then just sue for damages as well. I'm not sure I understand what the problem is.
- ritchiea 11y ago
  They probably don't have anyone on staff whose responsibility is to do that but it seems it would be in their best interest to create a department that defends their top contributors with DMCA takedown notices.
  - joeyaiello 11y ago
    If that's true, it feels like willful negligence. They have a video platform that has access to a billion people. These are views in the tens of millions. There's companies with order of magnitudes less traffic who have people fielding DMCA requests full-time. If FB doesn't, that's completely unacceptable, full stop.
    - Swannie 11y ago
      The suggestions was the it could be in YouTube's interest to create a team that sends out DMCA notices on the behalf of their top contributors. This would give YouTube a unique feature that would keep their content producers hosting content on their platform. However, the mechanics would be somewhat tricky. I'd guess it would work something like the following: submit a URL for a Facebook post/Wordpress post, that prompted YouTube to ContentID against your existing videos, and if it found a match, it put your flagged violation in a queue for human verification, and subsequent automated DMCA takedown gets sent to the hoster, along with a report of if the content is still available. Of course, that becomes open to the sort of abuse mentioned elsewhere in the thread. FaceBook certainly have a team responding to DMCA requests. They are just slow. Ideally, someone like YouTube licenses their technology, and opens up their contentID DB to the licensee for consumption... But again, I can see many avenues for abuse by licensee's (for example, automated "content capture" of content not currently in the DB), that would need good policies to help prevent.
rwmj 11y ago
This should be a fairly open and shut piracy case for the video maker. Zoo is a British magazine with a real company behind it. Facebook is a US-based company and is redistributing the video (and likely making money from the adverts). The video maker is based in the US. He can start with filing a case against FB (seems he has a US lawyer lined up already), and once he collects from that, he pays a UK lawyer to follow up against Zoo's parent.
- leephillips 11y ago
  And Zoo's actions are clearly willful infringement. I don't know if he can apply US law when going after the UK magazine, but in the US willful infringement can lead to $150,000 statutory damages per incident. They can't fall back on the "the user did it, we're not responsible" defense relied on by Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.
  - jonah 11y ago
    A friend of mine is going through this right now, a UK company ripped off his video and posted it on their site and on YouTube. They're playing hardball with some really strange reasoning. I'm sure they know they're in the wrong but if they admit it, they'll open the floodgates for more claims.
- corin_ 11y ago
  Wouldn't DMCA protect Facebook from legal action here?
  - developer1 11y ago
    Yes and no. Facebook can be forced to take down the content (this is the purpose of DMCA takedowns), so they are not protected from that. As for damages, no - you have to go after the person who posted it, in this case the scumbag assholes at Zoo.
  - acomjean 11y ago
    It would if they promptly removed offending content. I'm not sure what the exact timeline in the DMCA is (72 hours?), but the 17,000,000 views that went by before removal is something... (Not sure where the counter was when the removal request was received.) Not sure what that status of money made on material you've been told was infringing and haven't taken down is..
brokentone 11y ago
This seems to be shades of aggregate content farm business models. Is HuffingtonPost Comedy's recutting of cute cat videos without credit okay? How about BuzzFeed's use of stock / flickr images? What about memes -- someone took those photos once upon a time, now they don't even get a credit. How about the dumb radio station's non-original video clips circulating on FB?
- tedunangst 11y ago
  No. Yes. Yes. No. :) The meme background of e.g. not sure Fry doesn't substantially detract from the value of an episode of Futurama. The video reposts by various radio stations are exactly the same as the behavior in question.
personjerry 11y ago
I think the issue that the article points out is valid. But it expands to a bigger face than just Facebook. Namely, any content on the Internet, by virtue of being easily accessed, is easily duplicated. Sites like 9gag and Buzzfeed are full of reposts from Reddit and 4chan. "But wait!" you say, "those aren't the same. Those aren't making money like videos!" But the value of any content is to drive views and growth, and in that sense the text or image posts are worth just as much as video. We don't generally make the same big deal out of these as music or video because it is more difficult for creators of small content to complain.
- personjerry 11y ago
  If there were some sort of verification for each "content" post (i.e. music, video, image, text) forcing others to link to the original content rather than duplicate it, then the creator gets the benefit, while sites linking to them might be viewed as curators.
- spuz 11y ago
  The difference is that text and images do not have a native platform on which a context creator can publish AND monetise their work. For video there exists YouTube and music Spotify and YouTube again. The opportunities for monetising text and images are miniscule in comparison.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
austenallred 11y ago
This is absolutely rampant in the blackhat marketing world, (where I used to dabble, but still stay up on mostly out of curiosity). The model goes like this: Watch a few different pages and try to identify something that's bubbling up - that can be different viral facebook pages, reddit, whatever... there are a few different ways, but basically you constantly ping and scrape and try to identify stuff that's going viral as early as possible. Once you've done that, you have an automated script that downloads the video and uploads it to your Facebook page or scrapes the content and throws it on your wordpress site with a really weak "link back" to the original content. You build up a Facebook page that has a few million likes, cover your wordpress pages in ads, and profit. It's not incredibly difficult to create an automated-if-unethical Buzzfeed. It's incredible to watch one viral post or video spread throughout the web. It spreads out on different sites and platforms as quickly as it spreads on social media. Few end users really care what the original source was (especially since it's usually click-baity BS anyway), and the winners are the ones who can find the content the quickest and have the biggest reach. I talked to a guy a couple of days ago who is making $60,000/month using this exact process, and has very little programming ability. He is, however, an absolutely shrewd and ruthless marketer with no ethical qualms about much of anything. The content producers send him DMCA requests on occasion, and when that happens he or Facebook takes it down. But that's just a cost of doing business, and 95% of the content stolen never sees a DMCA request, so who cares? (Assuming you have no ethical compass). Content creators aren't constantly searching and scraping and trying to find other places where their content is hosted. That's hard enough to do on one platform alone (i.e. YouTube), let alone monitoring other platforms (Facebook) and a bunch of wordpress sites. It's a game of content creators vs. "marketers." It gets even more difficult for the content creators as the "marketers" get smarter - heighten the pitch of a video a little bit so sound matching software can't find it, reverse the video and choose different thumbnails so reverse image/video searches don't find it, spin the text content (visitors aren't really there for the great writing anyway), and you beat the vast majority of software. It's up to the individual content creators to play the same game Google is playing to kill the spammers, which is not their core competency. Unless Facebook does something on its own platform, this won't change. And even if they do, the best spammers will continue to outsmart the system. The only way Facebook (and the content creators) win is if it becomes a core competency, much the same way defeating spam is for Google. I still know guys who can beat Google, but the level of sophistication is high enough that 99% of people can't keep up. There are a few simple ways you can beat the vast majority of the content theft though; if anyone is interested feel free to email me and I'll point out some of the breadcrumbs the marketers leave behind.
hackuser 11y ago
A radical idea: Maybe our model of intellectual property is wrong, or outdated. When IP was tied to a physical object, it made some sense to restrict and explicitly license each reproducer. Now we have incredible machines that can reproduce intellectual property almost infinitely, distribute it anywhere on Earth, and find it almost anywhere on Earth. Wow! Maybe we should embrace that innovation, and find a model that encourages the spread, use and re-use of IP, for the betterment of society. Yes, motivating creators is a problem, but there are many possible solutions. Another radical thought: The notion of IP created from whole cloth obviously was always a fallacy; we all "stand on the shoulders of giants", "good artists borrow, great artists steal", etc. Now that our IP machines make finding, copying, and distributing IP so easy, we can expect even more of that wonderful, creative larceny. As IP creators are benefitting from these amazing IP finding/copying/distributing systems and so much of their own product is stolen, perhaps they have less claim on the profits from those things they put their names on. A third: Many creative people are motivated to do great things withhout payment. Remember, all those FOSS creators, from RMS to Linus Torvalds to Tim Berners-Lee to every little FOSS project on Github. Remember also Van Gogh and millions of other starving artists you have and haven't heard of (quick, name a poet who cashed in on their life's work). Perhaps financial renumeration, while fair, isn't entirely necessary (and perhaps we'd have less crap with less of it).
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > When IP was tied to a physical object Intellectual personal property, like intangible personal property more generally, is, by nature, not generally tied to a physical object.
  - Nullabillity 11y ago
    However, there used to be a significant cost involved in duplicating significant copyrightable works, and the scope of stuff that can be done with only new IP is continuously expanding.
- haberman 11y ago
  There are stories you could post this comment on that involve grey areas and subtlety. But this is a story about people who take other videos, strip the attribution, go viral, and get the benefits from work they had nothing to do with, while the person who actually did the work is cut out of the picture. There is nothing forward-thinking about that, it's just classless rip-off.
scrame 11y ago
Wow, Facebook is a bunch of assholes, screwing people over for a quick buck. Who would have thought...
- davidcgl 11y ago
  Someone stole the video and reposted it on Facebook. Facebook didn't do this.
rythie 11y ago
This seems pretty common in British newspapers, even outside facebook. Videos often appear on newspaper's own sites instead of embedding the YouTube video. For example this from the Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/apr/29/ed-miliband-russell-brand-video-highlights http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/apr/29/ed-mil...). Others are similar and often even have their own pre-rolls. Channel4 has whole TV programme, Rude Tube (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rude_Tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rude_Tube), devoted to internet clips, which are all from YouTube AFAIK. I wonder if the creators get any money from that.
- jonah 11y ago
  Yeah, a friend had his video taken by a British paper, stripped of its credits, embedded in an article and then uploaded to their YouTube channel. He sent them an invoice for usage but I haven't heard what the outcome was.
- maaaats 11y ago
  FYI: When a video goes "viral", one is quickly contacted by agencies(happened to me). They have standard deals with big media corporations, and handles the licensing. It frees the creator from having to make deals with hundreds of news papers. So, at least some of the big pages that use other's videos have paid to do so.
- bazzargh 11y ago
  For that example, there's no question it was licensed. Russell Brand writes for the Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/profile/russellbrand http://www.theguardian.com/profile/russellbrand
plorg 11y ago
I have a friend/acquaintance who had a similar experience on YouTube itself. He had created a large number of instructional videos on his YouTube channel, and from them he was deriving a significant passive income (admittedly from the overbearing amount of ads he enabled). One day he received a takedown notice suggesting that his videos were illicit copies. His investigations led him to believe that another YouTube user had downloaded all of his videos, re-uploaded them under a different account (with even more, similarly-ripped videos) and then used the YouTube machinery to have the originals flagged. This did, indeed, appear to be the case when I checked out the other channel - there was a block of videos in this other user's history that all clearly originated on my friend's channel, even with the original author identifying himself in the voiceover. He was unable to get YouTube to reinstate the original videos nor block the illicit new copies. After several months of shouting at the wall that is YouTube administration, he gave up and transferred his energy to creating numerous ad-laden blogs saturated also with Amazon affiliate links and embedded affiliate stores. On the one hand, it is possible that his original channel looked more like the channel of a spammer than the one that stole his videos (from my recollection of the old channel, not entirely implausible). On the other, it is possible that YouTube itself doesn't care much for its content creators outside of the few super-rich/popular/powerful users with enough influence to get their attention.
- johansch 11y ago
  That seems like almost criminally incompetent by YT. They don't even look at upload timestamps in whatever automated or manual process they use for this?
  - icebraining 11y ago
    You can't assume the videos are owned by someone just because they uploaded them first - many videos are ripped from other sources and uploaded first by unlicensed parties. They followed the same procedures as described in the DMCA (even if this probably wasn't an official takedown request): if someone claims they represent the copyright holder and the videos are infringing, the service provider must take them down expeditiously.
phkahler 11y ago
Doesn't the YouTube terms require that you allow some reuse of your video as long as its on there? The same thing goes on on YouTube itself where people create channels and aregate other popular videos.
msoad 11y ago
Yes, Facebook is a piracy heaven. It's not just for small video producers. Sport videos (which are really expensive) can be found for free in Facebook. Example: https://www.facebook.com/SuperHighlightsCom?fref=ts https://www.facebook.com/SuperHighlightsCom?fref=ts
sparkzilla 11y ago
Why is this a surprise? Facebook was founded on theft -- starting from when Zuckerberg stole the business from the Winklevoss twins.
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  OK, check the IM messages at the bottom of this post: http://gawker.com/5486554/mark-zuckerberg-will-personally-hack-your-facebook-account http://gawker.com/5486554/mark-zuckerberg-will-personally-ha...
stevenh 11y ago
Facebook not only added native video support, but their news feed algorithm blocks YouTube links in favor of native videos all of the time. They created the freebooting problem themselves on purpose to keep people (and ad revenue) locked into their own site. As far as piracy is concerned, I fail to see how Facebook is any better than MegaUpload. You might even say it's 1000 times worse, considering its alexa ranking is 1000 times better than MegaUpload's ever was. Why hasn't Zuckerberg's house been raided yet, and all Facebook servers confiscated?
- cmdrfred 11y ago
  The answer is always the same in America, Facebook has a better legal team.
habitue 11y ago
It seems like the major issue is that attribution was removed. The reposting stripped credit for the guy. I think everyone can agree that putting a movie up on the pirate bay, and putting a movie up on the pirate bay after stripping out the credits and putting your own name on it are two different kinds of things.
- yzzxy 11y ago
  The major issue is the revenue stream to the creator was removed. Someone (facebook and/or the page) was profiting directly or indirectly from the work, and not the author. That's copyright infringement and theft. The removal of the attribution is insult added to injury, but far less immediately important. I sometimes wonder if the tech startup crowd really believes "eyeballs," "exposure," and "active users" are inherently valuable. Maybe if you're shopping around to investors or patrons. Not if you're the other 99% of the population. For them, exposure is just a chance to grow the modest revenue stream they already have, or nothing at all. MAYBE you could get lucky and parlay it into a book deal or something, but probably not.
jakejake 11y ago
Would there be any reason why the content creator couldn't sue Facebook and/or Zoo RIAA style using the same copyright laws? Unlike music sharing, this situation probably does have a specific, tangible amount of revenue losses to the videographer.
BillyParadise 11y ago
So what Facebook needs to implement is an ultra simple content claiming mechanism. Offending video: My Video (can include youtube/vimeo/other link): No, not automatically scalable. Facebook started this, they're gonna have to staff up to handle the problems associated with it. I see Facebook has only recently started allowing people to monetize their uploads, so the primary benefit the "freebooters" got was traffic to their site. Maybe Facebook should take a page from porn and link-skim an equivalent number of page views from the freebooter to the victim. Talk about restitution! (incidentally, I've found Facebook far more responsive than Twitter. Imagine what happens when the big T gets into the video game in a big way)
benhamner 11y ago
A more accurate title: Youtube's Facebook Piracy Problem
finnyspade 11y ago
I don't understand what Facebook is supposed to be guilty of... Is Facebook supposed to somehow know the video was uploaded to YouTube before? That would require Facebook to have an index of all the content on YouTube (an unreasonable proposal). The next best thing is to allow takedown requests which they do! The same thing can be done by reposting on Vimeo or any of a million sites. There just is no technologically and legally sound method to detect this sort of behavior. If you don't want your video to be reposted by someone else, post it yourself. That's not to say it's okay for pirating to happen but this isn't Facebook evil, it's people. One might blame Facebook for prioritizing it's native videos over embedded YouTube content but their policy on that is very public and the user experience IS better. Why is Facebook being demonized?
- erebus_rex 11y ago
  Because they make their takedown process incredibly longwinded and kafkaesque. Not only did Destin promptly file his claim, but many of his fans repeatedly contacted facebook and Bauer about it. The fact that it took so long for either to even acknowledge the problem existed is evidence that facebook has little incentive to speed up the takedown process to a reasonable bureaucracy.
  - finnyspade 11y ago
    didn't the article say 2 days? That's not exactly horrible response time.
yalogin 11y ago
Youtube became exactly because of pirated videos in its early days. Viacom and others fought for a long time to keep their videos off of youtube but eventually gave in. Now FB is doing the same thing.
- AdieuToLogic 11y ago
  > Youtube became exactly because of pirated videos in its early days. I think this is the quintessential definition of "Quid Pro Quo"[1]. 1 - http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quid%20pro%20quo http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quid%20pro%20quo
runn1ng 11y ago
Let's not pretend YouTube didn't become big by the same way; it was from the start a giant platform for "illegally" sharing copyrighted videos. It got better in this regard lately but the fact that it was full of copyrighted stuff helped them bootstrap.
AdieuToLogic 11y ago
All of this outrage at Facebook doing what Youtube already did[1] is difficult to fathom. Don't get me wrong, Facebook is not a site I use, am affiliated with, condone, or recommend. But screaming bloody murder because they are doing to the site what that site did to others seems a bit of a stretch. If hating on Facebook needs to happen (probably does, BTW), how about it's done for reasons such as their laughable "Terms of Service"[2] and how it blatantly states they instantly own anything passing through them without any consideration? Now that's a bitterness I can get behind. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._YouTube,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y.... 2 - https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
- maaarghk 11y ago
  this isn't a case that can be framed in terms of Facebook stealing from YouTube. Just like when YouTube users stole from movie and music publishers, this is Facebook users stealing from YouTube "content creators". All this talk of "so what, YouTube did it too" for a start doesn't excuse the law but more to the point, it disguises the fact that YT arent the ones who are suffering from the consequences of this trend - publishers using it as a platform are. By bringing up Facebooks privacy policy you are adding nothing to the discussion of the culture of FB users stealing YouTube users' videos sans accreditation.
  - AdieuToLogic 11y ago
    > Just like when YouTube users stole from movie and music publishers, this is Facebook users stealing from YouTube "content creators". My point exactly. > All this talk of "so what, YouTube did it too" ... I didn't say "so what." I said Youtube became the billion dollar acquisition it was by doing exactly what Facebook is doing to them. I believe the appropriate term is "Quid Pro Quo." > ... it disguises the fact that YT arent the ones who are suffering from the consequences of this trend - publishers using it as a platform are. Cannot the same thing be said to the people employed by content producers such as Viacom et al? When Youtube used the same "we'll take this stuff down, but drag our heels doing it" tactics Facebook is doing now, were not real artists impacted? How is "publishers using it as a platform" in any way different than "publishers using Viacom as a platform?" > By bringing up Facebooks privacy policy you are adding nothing to the discussion of the culture of FB users stealing YouTube users' videos sans accreditation. I brought up Facebook's "Terms of Service" because I find it repugnant. If you don't see it that way, so be it. If you are so ardently dedicated to this cause, why not follow the path of Metallica[1]? 1 - http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/04/35670 http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/04/35670
scotty79 11y ago
Why they don't post to Facebook as well? If they have some good content and they don't push it on some market then somebody else will. I know, I know. Piracy, copyright, "I made it, they just remixed it by cutting me out". "It's mine, where is my money?!" Internet apparently doesn't care. Either you serve the market your content or the market gets served your content without ever knowing about you. Is Facebook profiting from this? Sure. Was/is YouTube profiting from the same thing? Yes. Do internet providers profit from piracy in general? Of course. Same as writable DVD manufacturers were. XEROX owners and whoever. Is that bad? It's way better than if it was to be made absolutely sure that they don't.
amelius 11y ago
It is actually quite simple to combat this, technically. Embed an (invisible) watermark into the video that encodes the domain for which the movie can be played, and have all browsers refuse to play content with watermarks that are of a different domain than the one shown in the url bar (throw a security exception or something).
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  Using the example in the article, we're already dealing with companies that are willfully violating copyright (not some dummy kid uploading tv clips to youtube with "no copyright entended" in the description). How do they not also work around this system? Say I go on youtube, download Destin's video, cut out his talking and advertizing portions. I'll just change the watermark while I'm there and then slap it on facebook. Even if we go cryptographic, and replace the watermarks with public key signing, does facebook only host properly signed videos? Then how does the chain of trust work? For automated transcoding by youtube and the like work? How do I get a trusted public key for cute videos of my cats that doesn't create an infinite well of keys for freebooters? So maybe we can't just sign, we have to add in DRM so that only authorized player widgets can even decode the video in the first place. That doesn't stop piracy of hollywood material, why would it stop a media company from freebooting?
TerryCarlin 11y ago
I think a better term for this would be "facebooting".
jokoon 11y ago
Every company having its success is paid by having shitty practices. It is a standard. I even wonder if this is correlated with social darwinism, that, for some cultural reason, you must be bad so be successful. Maybe the technologies of internet will improve up to the point there will be no multinational group able to reap the benefit (a more decentralized internet with bitcoin-like architectures), but I don't see it happening very soon. I can guess consumers could understand the complexity of technology only so much, I wonder if improving those technologies and making them also as much accessible is really possible. Facebook is really the low hanging fruit of the web. They might have open sourced stuff, but they're really evil in the google sense of the word. I can already remember 2 examples: the click farms and internet.org, and I'm sure there are so many other examples. All of this makes me really sad, because the internet is the #1 tech tool that is improving the lives of so many people, and there is already so much greed involved.

439 points by wesd 11y ago

superuser2 11y ago

I don't understand how this is "Facebook's" piracy problem. It sounds like the British newspaper's piracy problem.

brokentone 11y ago
If the tooling isn't there for reporting. Youtube, for example, has worked really hard with Content ID to be able to automatically report and repoint infringing content.
- dasil003 11y ago
  Not just that, but the fact that the content is unsearchable, and the fact that Facebook is profiting heavily from it as fuel for one of its latest "frictionless engagement" features is fairly damning. That's not to say Facebook isn't taking reasonable measures, but if you look how incentives are aligned it doesn't inspire confidence.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  This may be the first post in the history of HN that isn't completely negative about content ID.
psychometry 11y ago
Because FB's infrastructure doesn't prevent piracy or offer creators ways of identifying it.
spuz 11y ago
If you don't understand by reading the article I highly recommend watching Sandalin's video about it.

001sky 11y ago

This title seems (a bit) like blaming the stock exchange for insider trading.

belorn 11y ago
Do the stock exchange earn money on insider trading? If not then thats a key difference when it comes to incentives and encouraging such activities.
- avn2109 11y ago
  I'm not an expert, but I assume the exchange takes the same cut of the bid ask spread on an insider trade as it does on any other trade. So the answer to your question is an unequivocal yes.

mosquito242 11y ago

This is super interesting - it seems like facebook's more likely to get away with it too because the people being ripped off are smaller independent YouTube Channels. It seems like YouTube's main incentive to build out copyright infringement tools was all of the record labels that had songs being uploaded and re-uploaded on the platform. I can see YouTube getting really aggressive in fighting FB on this legally, because they need to defend their own content providers before they move to Facebook (or start uploading to both facebook/youtube).

jsprogrammer 11y ago
The content producers should file DMCA notices with the hosts if they don't want their content there. It seems like it would be in the interest of producers to register their works in well-known repositories so that viewers can have a high degree of confidence that the content they are viewing has the claimed provenance.
- deathhand 11y ago
  If youtube could provide DMCA tools to the everyman then things will get interesting. If Google could tell me when and where my video is being pirated I could see this be a HUGE boon to their content distribution system. Everyone would want to distribute with them.
- bsder 11y ago
  > The content producers should file DMCA notices with the hosts if they don't want their content there. If you even know it's there. Is a Facebook video with a million view likely to cross your particular feed? Especially if it's in another country? Especially if someone took pains to remove identifying characteristics? > It seems like it would be in the interest of producers to register their works in well-known repositories YouTube seems like a pretty well known repository to me ...
tedunangst 11y ago
YouTube will have a hard time fighting this directly, since they don't own the content. Much like craigslist couldn't directly go after 3taps for copying, but only the scraping. And in this case, Facebook isn't doing the scraping.

ericras 11y ago

Like usual, currently Facebook doesn't think they have much of a "problem" at all. It only becomes a problem if someone calls them out on it - probably in a court.

Mithaldu 11y ago

It sounds to me like part of the problem is that the people making popular videos don't share them on facebook themselves, which results in the modern internet native's primary reaction to media being unavailable in their preferred venue and at their preferred comfortability level: Piracy. Sure, you can fight back by appealing to the public about facebook's evility, or by spending lots of resources in legal action. Or you can roll with the punches and figure out the myriad ways in which even the currently broken facebook system can work for you.

Jare 11y ago
How would those videos monetize for the author when posted on Facebook? The article says Facebook's ad revenue sharing is in the works but not quite there yet .
- scott_s 11y ago
  Probably not directly at the moment, but they could do something similar to what the people who are ripping them off are doing: create a FB page for exposure, and hope that exposure turns into views on their YouTube channel.
  - bsder 11y ago
    But why should I go watch the video on YouTube when I just watched it on Facebook? Even better, the Facebook video doesn't have ads.
    - tedunangst 11y ago
      The classic pirate answer is that after you torrent an album to try it out, you go buy a copy to support the artist. So after you watch the Facebook video, you'd go watch it again on YouTube to support the creator.
      - bsder 11y ago
        And we all know how well that worked for the music industry.

kevando 11y ago

Didn't youtube start the same way?

teraflop 11y ago
The article touches on that: > Maybe this is just a stage of development for online video platforms: grow first, then cover your legal bases. Some might even see poetic justice in the potential disruption of YouTube’s business by an upstart that plays a little faster and looser when it comes to copyright enforcement.
larrys 11y ago
Sure but from my understanding of the article youtube isn't really the aggrieved party it's the creators that are.
- qq66 11y ago
  YouTube is an aggrieved party since they are losing money too, but there's far more popular sympathy for the individual creators.
dasil003 11y ago
Sure, but YouTube was a startup in a nascent industry.
cookiecaper 11y ago
YouTube started under much different circumstances. Facebook doesn't really have an excuse.
nnbvv 11y ago
There's actually still quite a bit of piracy on Youtube. Channels that do this will often crop the video, or change the pitch of the audio, to avoid flagging from Youtube's piracy detection algorithm. For example, I saw the film Citizen 4 relabelled as something generic like "Surveillance Documentary" and it had millions of views.

sourthyme 11y ago

It seems like it would be easy for Facebook to support takedowns since it could remove the video from feeds.

forgetsusername 11y ago
>It seems like it would be easy for Facebook to support takedowns since it could remove the video from feeds. Why would they want to until they're somehow forced to? Much like all the fake accounts and associated "like" markets, there's zero incentive for them to correct the issues.
edgarvaldes 11y ago
>Facebook typically complies, they said—but often not until a day or two later, by which time the video’s virality has run much of its course. Two days, Sandlin told me, is “basically forever in Internet time.”
jboggan 11y ago
Takedowns suck. Content creators don't want that and people driving traffic to their page don't want that. The crucial thing about YouTube and ContentID is that you can leave the videos alone but choose to monetize (take all ad revenue) from a re-uploaded video instead of just showing a black box and a takedown notice. It works and it is seamless on YouTube but I don't know if Facebook has built anything similar. More interesting will be how Facebook and YouTube handle content exclusively uploaded on one platform or the other but re-uploaded cross-platform. Shameless plug: we (FullScreen) have a video uploader service that uploads to both platforms with several custom options such as staggered release on the two platforms or say putting a short preview clip on Facebook that links to the full video on (monetized) YouTube: http://www.fullscreen.com/2015/05/21/fullscreen-uploader-is-here/ http://www.fullscreen.com/2015/05/21/fullscreen-uploader-is-...
- leephillips 11y ago
  "Takedowns suck." No, stealing (yes, stealing) people's work sucks. Unjustified takedown requests do suck (and what makes them suck so much is platforms' craven response to frivolous requests). But we're talking about real, willful infringement here. "Content creators don't want that" You probably shouldn't try to speak for all of us, because you are wrong.

willlma 11y ago

Ironically, at the end of the tattoo video that was pirated, Destin Sandlin, the host, is seen wearing [a shirt](http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Going-Science-T-Shirt-Scientists/dp/B006FCNWNY/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Going-Science-T-Shirt-Scientists...) that is a blatant rip off of an Randall Munroe's (XKCD) [shirt](http://store-xkcd-com.myshopify.com/products/try-science http://store-xkcd-com.myshopify.com/products/try-science).

ljk 11y ago
That always made me wonder, the people who sell shirts with logos/pop references shirts in mall booths, do they pay the artist a license fee to sell them?
- sbarre 11y ago
  NOPE
- bmelton 11y ago
  The people who sell the shirts? No. The people who manufacture the shirts? Yes, at least in theory.
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  They do if the copyright owner comes knocking. http://kotaku.com/the-maker-of-the-trollface-meme-is-counting-his-money-1696228810 http://kotaku.com/the-maker-of-the-trollface-meme-is-countin...
hudj1jcnapru38 11y ago
In case anyone hasn't seen Destin's videos (smarter every day), I'd like to mention that he's an incredibly interesting and engaging person who puts out really high quality content. If you're like me, and think of the pieces of shit that run the RIAA when you hear about piracy complaints... it's worth watching Destin and his videos to see a much more sympathetic actor. (Also, his big beef seems to be facebook's incentives to make money off those videos w/o giving him some... he's not talking about torrents specifically)

solidpy 11y ago

But is it Facebook or the magazine that ripped and modified the video the one at fault? Issue a DMCA to Facebook and sue the magazine for copyright infringement. And next time post it yourself.

cjmcqueen 11y ago
Really tough for a small creator to police without tools. I think the lack of tools is the real place where Facebook is going to see trouble.
JusticeJuice 11y ago
The problem with posting it yourself, is unless you've spent ages cultivating a fb page with heaps of followers, you won't get any traction or views at all. And posting it yourself won't stop a larger fb page taking it.
JusticeJuice 11y ago
The problem with posting it yourself, is unless you've spent ages cultivating a fb page with heaps of followers, you won't get any traction or views at all. And posting it yourself won't stop a larger fb page taking it.
lips 11y ago
They're both at fault, to varying degrees, explicitly or implicitly. Destin mentions in his "intro to freebooting" video his various attempts to contact Facebook regarding the piracy, and that it was only removed after a Twitter campaign led by his viewers: https://youtu.be/L6A1Lt0kvMA?t=3m49s https://youtu.be/L6A1Lt0kvMA?t=3m49s I don't know much, or have any experience with DMCA, but it's my impression that if there's a copyright violation on Youtube, the video can be taken down very quickly, and the burden of proof is then placed on the uploader to get it back up.

dimino 11y ago

Why can't YouTube users just send a DMCA takedown notice to Facebook? If a video makes someone a decent amount of money, then just sue for damages as well. I'm not sure I understand what the problem is.

ritchiea 11y ago
They probably don't have anyone on staff whose responsibility is to do that but it seems it would be in their best interest to create a department that defends their top contributors with DMCA takedown notices.
- joeyaiello 11y ago
  If that's true, it feels like willful negligence. They have a video platform that has access to a billion people. These are views in the tens of millions. There's companies with order of magnitudes less traffic who have people fielding DMCA requests full-time. If FB doesn't, that's completely unacceptable, full stop.
  - Swannie 11y ago
    The suggestions was the it could be in YouTube's interest to create a team that sends out DMCA notices on the behalf of their top contributors. This would give YouTube a unique feature that would keep their content producers hosting content on their platform. However, the mechanics would be somewhat tricky. I'd guess it would work something like the following: submit a URL for a Facebook post/Wordpress post, that prompted YouTube to ContentID against your existing videos, and if it found a match, it put your flagged violation in a queue for human verification, and subsequent automated DMCA takedown gets sent to the hoster, along with a report of if the content is still available. Of course, that becomes open to the sort of abuse mentioned elsewhere in the thread. FaceBook certainly have a team responding to DMCA requests. They are just slow. Ideally, someone like YouTube licenses their technology, and opens up their contentID DB to the licensee for consumption... But again, I can see many avenues for abuse by licensee's (for example, automated "content capture" of content not currently in the DB), that would need good policies to help prevent.

rwmj 11y ago

This should be a fairly open and shut piracy case for the video maker. Zoo is a British magazine with a real company behind it. Facebook is a US-based company and is redistributing the video (and likely making money from the adverts). The video maker is based in the US. He can start with filing a case against FB (seems he has a US lawyer lined up already), and once he collects from that, he pays a UK lawyer to follow up against Zoo's parent.

leephillips 11y ago
And Zoo's actions are clearly willful infringement. I don't know if he can apply US law when going after the UK magazine, but in the US willful infringement can lead to $150,000 statutory damages per incident. They can't fall back on the "the user did it, we're not responsible" defense relied on by Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.
- jonah 11y ago
  A friend of mine is going through this right now, a UK company ripped off his video and posted it on their site and on YouTube. They're playing hardball with some really strange reasoning. I'm sure they know they're in the wrong but if they admit it, they'll open the floodgates for more claims.
corin_ 11y ago
Wouldn't DMCA protect Facebook from legal action here?
- developer1 11y ago
  Yes and no. Facebook can be forced to take down the content (this is the purpose of DMCA takedowns), so they are not protected from that. As for damages, no - you have to go after the person who posted it, in this case the scumbag assholes at Zoo.
- acomjean 11y ago
  It would if they promptly removed offending content. I'm not sure what the exact timeline in the DMCA is (72 hours?), but the 17,000,000 views that went by before removal is something... (Not sure where the counter was when the removal request was received.) Not sure what that status of money made on material you've been told was infringing and haven't taken down is..

brokentone 11y ago

This seems to be shades of aggregate content farm business models. Is HuffingtonPost Comedy's recutting of cute cat videos without credit okay? How about BuzzFeed's use of stock / flickr images? What about memes -- someone took those photos once upon a time, now they don't even get a credit. How about the dumb radio station's non-original video clips circulating on FB?

tedunangst 11y ago
No. Yes. Yes. No. :) The meme background of e.g. not sure Fry doesn't substantially detract from the value of an episode of Futurama. The video reposts by various radio stations are exactly the same as the behavior in question.

personjerry 11y ago

I think the issue that the article points out is valid. But it expands to a bigger face than just Facebook. Namely, any content on the Internet, by virtue of being easily accessed, is easily duplicated. Sites like 9gag and Buzzfeed are full of reposts from Reddit and 4chan. "But wait!" you say, "those aren't the same. Those aren't making money like videos!" But the value of any content is to drive views and growth, and in that sense the text or image posts are worth just as much as video. We don't generally make the same big deal out of these as music or video because it is more difficult for creators of small content to complain.

personjerry 11y ago
If there were some sort of verification for each "content" post (i.e. music, video, image, text) forcing others to link to the original content rather than duplicate it, then the creator gets the benefit, while sites linking to them might be viewed as curators.
spuz 11y ago
The difference is that text and images do not have a native platform on which a context creator can publish AND monetise their work. For video there exists YouTube and music Spotify and YouTube again. The opportunities for monetising text and images are miniscule in comparison.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

austenallred 11y ago

This is absolutely rampant in the blackhat marketing world, (where I used to dabble, but still stay up on mostly out of curiosity). The model goes like this: Watch a few different pages and try to identify something that's bubbling up - that can be different viral facebook pages, reddit, whatever... there are a few different ways, but basically you constantly ping and scrape and try to identify stuff that's going viral as early as possible. Once you've done that, you have an automated script that downloads the video and uploads it to your Facebook page or scrapes the content and throws it on your wordpress site with a really weak "link back" to the original content. You build up a Facebook page that has a few million likes, cover your wordpress pages in ads, and profit. It's not incredibly difficult to create an automated-if-unethical Buzzfeed. It's incredible to watch one viral post or video spread throughout the web. It spreads out on different sites and platforms as quickly as it spreads on social media. Few end users really care what the original source was (especially since it's usually click-baity BS anyway), and the winners are the ones who can find the content the quickest and have the biggest reach. I talked to a guy a couple of days ago who is making $60,000/month using this exact process, and has very little programming ability. He is, however, an absolutely shrewd and ruthless marketer with no ethical qualms about much of anything. The content producers send him DMCA requests on occasion, and when that happens he or Facebook takes it down. But that's just a cost of doing business, and 95% of the content stolen never sees a DMCA request, so who cares? (Assuming you have no ethical compass). Content creators aren't constantly searching and scraping and trying to find other places where their content is hosted. That's hard enough to do on one platform alone (i.e. YouTube), let alone monitoring other platforms (Facebook) and a bunch of wordpress sites. It's a game of content creators vs. "marketers." It gets even more difficult for the content creators as the "marketers" get smarter - heighten the pitch of a video a little bit so sound matching software can't find it, reverse the video and choose different thumbnails so reverse image/video searches don't find it, spin the text content (visitors aren't really there for the great writing anyway), and you beat the vast majority of software. It's up to the individual content creators to play the same game Google is playing to kill the spammers, which is not their core competency. Unless Facebook does something on its own platform, this won't change. And even if they do, the best spammers will continue to outsmart the system. The only way Facebook (and the content creators) win is if it becomes a core competency, much the same way defeating spam is for Google. I still know guys who can beat Google, but the level of sophistication is high enough that 99% of people can't keep up. There are a few simple ways you can beat the vast majority of the content theft though; if anyone is interested feel free to email me and I'll point out some of the breadcrumbs the marketers leave behind.

hackuser 11y ago

A radical idea: Maybe our model of intellectual property is wrong, or outdated. When IP was tied to a physical object, it made some sense to restrict and explicitly license each reproducer. Now we have incredible machines that can reproduce intellectual property almost infinitely, distribute it anywhere on Earth, and find it almost anywhere on Earth. Wow! Maybe we should embrace that innovation, and find a model that encourages the spread, use and re-use of IP, for the betterment of society. Yes, motivating creators is a problem, but there are many possible solutions. Another radical thought: The notion of IP created from whole cloth obviously was always a fallacy; we all "stand on the shoulders of giants", "good artists borrow, great artists steal", etc. Now that our IP machines make finding, copying, and distributing IP so easy, we can expect even more of that wonderful, creative larceny. As IP creators are benefitting from these amazing IP finding/copying/distributing systems and so much of their own product is stolen, perhaps they have less claim on the profits from those things they put their names on. A third: Many creative people are motivated to do great things withhout payment. Remember, all those FOSS creators, from RMS to Linus Torvalds to Tim Berners-Lee to every little FOSS project on Github. Remember also Van Gogh and millions of other starving artists you have and haven't heard of (quick, name a poet who cashed in on their life's work). Perhaps financial renumeration, while fair, isn't entirely necessary (and perhaps we'd have less crap with less of it).

dragonwriter 11y ago
> When IP was tied to a physical object Intellectual personal property, like intangible personal property more generally, is, by nature, not generally tied to a physical object.
- Nullabillity 11y ago
  However, there used to be a significant cost involved in duplicating significant copyrightable works, and the scope of stuff that can be done with only new IP is continuously expanding.
haberman 11y ago
There are stories you could post this comment on that involve grey areas and subtlety. But this is a story about people who take other videos, strip the attribution, go viral, and get the benefits from work they had nothing to do with, while the person who actually did the work is cut out of the picture. There is nothing forward-thinking about that, it's just classless rip-off.

scrame 11y ago

Wow, Facebook is a bunch of assholes, screwing people over for a quick buck. Who would have thought...

davidcgl 11y ago
Someone stole the video and reposted it on Facebook. Facebook didn't do this.

rythie 11y ago

This seems pretty common in British newspapers, even outside facebook. Videos often appear on newspaper's own sites instead of embedding the YouTube video. For example this from the Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/apr/29/ed-miliband-russell-brand-video-highlights http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/apr/29/ed-mil...). Others are similar and often even have their own pre-rolls. Channel4 has whole TV programme, Rude Tube (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rude_Tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rude_Tube), devoted to internet clips, which are all from YouTube AFAIK. I wonder if the creators get any money from that.

jonah 11y ago
Yeah, a friend had his video taken by a British paper, stripped of its credits, embedded in an article and then uploaded to their YouTube channel. He sent them an invoice for usage but I haven't heard what the outcome was.
maaaats 11y ago
FYI: When a video goes "viral", one is quickly contacted by agencies(happened to me). They have standard deals with big media corporations, and handles the licensing. It frees the creator from having to make deals with hundreds of news papers. So, at least some of the big pages that use other's videos have paid to do so.
bazzargh 11y ago
For that example, there's no question it was licensed. Russell Brand writes for the Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/profile/russellbrand http://www.theguardian.com/profile/russellbrand

plorg 11y ago

I have a friend/acquaintance who had a similar experience on YouTube itself. He had created a large number of instructional videos on his YouTube channel, and from them he was deriving a significant passive income (admittedly from the overbearing amount of ads he enabled). One day he received a takedown notice suggesting that his videos were illicit copies. His investigations led him to believe that another YouTube user had downloaded all of his videos, re-uploaded them under a different account (with even more, similarly-ripped videos) and then used the YouTube machinery to have the originals flagged. This did, indeed, appear to be the case when I checked out the other channel - there was a block of videos in this other user's history that all clearly originated on my friend's channel, even with the original author identifying himself in the voiceover. He was unable to get YouTube to reinstate the original videos nor block the illicit new copies. After several months of shouting at the wall that is YouTube administration, he gave up and transferred his energy to creating numerous ad-laden blogs saturated also with Amazon affiliate links and embedded affiliate stores. On the one hand, it is possible that his original channel looked more like the channel of a spammer than the one that stole his videos (from my recollection of the old channel, not entirely implausible). On the other, it is possible that YouTube itself doesn't care much for its content creators outside of the few super-rich/popular/powerful users with enough influence to get their attention.

johansch 11y ago
That seems like almost criminally incompetent by YT. They don't even look at upload timestamps in whatever automated or manual process they use for this?
- icebraining 11y ago
  You can't assume the videos are owned by someone just because they uploaded them first - many videos are ripped from other sources and uploaded first by unlicensed parties. They followed the same procedures as described in the DMCA (even if this probably wasn't an official takedown request): if someone claims they represent the copyright holder and the videos are infringing, the service provider must take them down expeditiously.

phkahler 11y ago

Doesn't the YouTube terms require that you allow some reuse of your video as long as its on there? The same thing goes on on YouTube itself where people create channels and aregate other popular videos.

msoad 11y ago

Yes, Facebook is a piracy heaven. It's not just for small video producers. Sport videos (which are really expensive) can be found for free in Facebook. Example: https://www.facebook.com/SuperHighlightsCom?fref=ts https://www.facebook.com/SuperHighlightsCom?fref=ts

sparkzilla 11y ago

Why is this a surprise? Facebook was founded on theft -- starting from when Zuckerberg stole the business from the Winklevoss twins.

sparkzilla 11y ago
OK, check the IM messages at the bottom of this post: http://gawker.com/5486554/mark-zuckerberg-will-personally-hack-your-facebook-account http://gawker.com/5486554/mark-zuckerberg-will-personally-ha...

stevenh 11y ago

Facebook not only added native video support, but their news feed algorithm blocks YouTube links in favor of native videos all of the time. They created the freebooting problem themselves on purpose to keep people (and ad revenue) locked into their own site. As far as piracy is concerned, I fail to see how Facebook is any better than MegaUpload. You might even say it's 1000 times worse, considering its alexa ranking is 1000 times better than MegaUpload's ever was. Why hasn't Zuckerberg's house been raided yet, and all Facebook servers confiscated?

cmdrfred 11y ago
The answer is always the same in America, Facebook has a better legal team.

habitue 11y ago

It seems like the major issue is that attribution was removed. The reposting stripped credit for the guy. I think everyone can agree that putting a movie up on the pirate bay, and putting a movie up on the pirate bay after stripping out the credits and putting your own name on it are two different kinds of things.

yzzxy 11y ago
The major issue is the revenue stream to the creator was removed. Someone (facebook and/or the page) was profiting directly or indirectly from the work, and not the author. That's copyright infringement and theft. The removal of the attribution is insult added to injury, but far less immediately important. I sometimes wonder if the tech startup crowd really believes "eyeballs," "exposure," and "active users" are inherently valuable. Maybe if you're shopping around to investors or patrons. Not if you're the other 99% of the population. For them, exposure is just a chance to grow the modest revenue stream they already have, or nothing at all. MAYBE you could get lucky and parlay it into a book deal or something, but probably not.

jakejake 11y ago

Would there be any reason why the content creator couldn't sue Facebook and/or Zoo RIAA style using the same copyright laws? Unlike music sharing, this situation probably does have a specific, tangible amount of revenue losses to the videographer.

BillyParadise 11y ago

So what Facebook needs to implement is an ultra simple content claiming mechanism. Offending video: My Video (can include youtube/vimeo/other link): No, not automatically scalable. Facebook started this, they're gonna have to staff up to handle the problems associated with it. I see Facebook has only recently started allowing people to monetize their uploads, so the primary benefit the "freebooters" got was traffic to their site. Maybe Facebook should take a page from porn and link-skim an equivalent number of page views from the freebooter to the victim. Talk about restitution! (incidentally, I've found Facebook far more responsive than Twitter. Imagine what happens when the big T gets into the video game in a big way)

benhamner 11y ago

A more accurate title: Youtube's Facebook Piracy Problem

finnyspade 11y ago

I don't understand what Facebook is supposed to be guilty of... Is Facebook supposed to somehow know the video was uploaded to YouTube before? That would require Facebook to have an index of all the content on YouTube (an unreasonable proposal). The next best thing is to allow takedown requests which they do! The same thing can be done by reposting on Vimeo or any of a million sites. There just is no technologically and legally sound method to detect this sort of behavior. If you don't want your video to be reposted by someone else, post it yourself. That's not to say it's okay for pirating to happen but this isn't Facebook evil, it's people. One might blame Facebook for prioritizing it's native videos over embedded YouTube content but their policy on that is very public and the user experience IS better. Why is Facebook being demonized?

erebus_rex 11y ago
Because they make their takedown process incredibly longwinded and kafkaesque. Not only did Destin promptly file his claim, but many of his fans repeatedly contacted facebook and Bauer about it. The fact that it took so long for either to even acknowledge the problem existed is evidence that facebook has little incentive to speed up the takedown process to a reasonable bureaucracy.
- finnyspade 11y ago
  didn't the article say 2 days? That's not exactly horrible response time.

yalogin 11y ago

Youtube became exactly because of pirated videos in its early days. Viacom and others fought for a long time to keep their videos off of youtube but eventually gave in. Now FB is doing the same thing.

AdieuToLogic 11y ago
> Youtube became exactly because of pirated videos in its early days. I think this is the quintessential definition of "Quid Pro Quo"[1]. 1 - http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quid%20pro%20quo http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quid%20pro%20quo

runn1ng 11y ago

Let's not pretend YouTube didn't become big by the same way; it was from the start a giant platform for "illegally" sharing copyrighted videos. It got better in this regard lately but the fact that it was full of copyrighted stuff helped them bootstrap.

AdieuToLogic 11y ago

All of this outrage at Facebook doing what Youtube already did[1] is difficult to fathom. Don't get me wrong, Facebook is not a site I use, am affiliated with, condone, or recommend. But screaming bloody murder because they are doing to the site what that site did to others seems a bit of a stretch. If hating on Facebook needs to happen (probably does, BTW), how about it's done for reasons such as their laughable "Terms of Service"[2] and how it blatantly states they instantly own anything passing through them without any consideration? Now that's a bitterness I can get behind. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._YouTube,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y.... 2 - https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms

maaarghk 11y ago
this isn't a case that can be framed in terms of Facebook stealing from YouTube. Just like when YouTube users stole from movie and music publishers, this is Facebook users stealing from YouTube "content creators". All this talk of "so what, YouTube did it too" for a start doesn't excuse the law but more to the point, it disguises the fact that YT arent the ones who are suffering from the consequences of this trend - publishers using it as a platform are. By bringing up Facebooks privacy policy you are adding nothing to the discussion of the culture of FB users stealing YouTube users' videos sans accreditation.
- AdieuToLogic 11y ago
  > Just like when YouTube users stole from movie and music publishers, this is Facebook users stealing from YouTube "content creators". My point exactly. > All this talk of "so what, YouTube did it too" ... I didn't say "so what." I said Youtube became the billion dollar acquisition it was by doing exactly what Facebook is doing to them. I believe the appropriate term is "Quid Pro Quo." > ... it disguises the fact that YT arent the ones who are suffering from the consequences of this trend - publishers using it as a platform are. Cannot the same thing be said to the people employed by content producers such as Viacom et al? When Youtube used the same "we'll take this stuff down, but drag our heels doing it" tactics Facebook is doing now, were not real artists impacted? How is "publishers using it as a platform" in any way different than "publishers using Viacom as a platform?" > By bringing up Facebooks privacy policy you are adding nothing to the discussion of the culture of FB users stealing YouTube users' videos sans accreditation. I brought up Facebook's "Terms of Service" because I find it repugnant. If you don't see it that way, so be it. If you are so ardently dedicated to this cause, why not follow the path of Metallica[1]? 1 - http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/04/35670 http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/04/35670

scotty79 11y ago

Why they don't post to Facebook as well? If they have some good content and they don't push it on some market then somebody else will. I know, I know. Piracy, copyright, "I made it, they just remixed it by cutting me out". "It's mine, where is my money?!" Internet apparently doesn't care. Either you serve the market your content or the market gets served your content without ever knowing about you. Is Facebook profiting from this? Sure. Was/is YouTube profiting from the same thing? Yes. Do internet providers profit from piracy in general? Of course. Same as writable DVD manufacturers were. XEROX owners and whoever. Is that bad? It's way better than if it was to be made absolutely sure that they don't.

amelius 11y ago

It is actually quite simple to combat this, technically. Embed an (invisible) watermark into the video that encodes the domain for which the movie can be played, and have all browsers refuse to play content with watermarks that are of a different domain than the one shown in the url bar (throw a security exception or something).

forgottenpass 11y ago
Using the example in the article, we're already dealing with companies that are willfully violating copyright (not some dummy kid uploading tv clips to youtube with "no copyright entended" in the description). How do they not also work around this system? Say I go on youtube, download Destin's video, cut out his talking and advertizing portions. I'll just change the watermark while I'm there and then slap it on facebook. Even if we go cryptographic, and replace the watermarks with public key signing, does facebook only host properly signed videos? Then how does the chain of trust work? For automated transcoding by youtube and the like work? How do I get a trusted public key for cute videos of my cats that doesn't create an infinite well of keys for freebooters? So maybe we can't just sign, we have to add in DRM so that only authorized player widgets can even decode the video in the first place. That doesn't stop piracy of hollywood material, why would it stop a media company from freebooting?

TerryCarlin 11y ago

I think a better term for this would be "facebooting".

jokoon 11y ago

Every company having its success is paid by having shitty practices. It is a standard. I even wonder if this is correlated with social darwinism, that, for some cultural reason, you must be bad so be successful. Maybe the technologies of internet will improve up to the point there will be no multinational group able to reap the benefit (a more decentralized internet with bitcoin-like architectures), but I don't see it happening very soon. I can guess consumers could understand the complexity of technology only so much, I wonder if improving those technologies and making them also as much accessible is really possible. Facebook is really the low hanging fruit of the web. They might have open sourced stuff, but they're really evil in the google sense of the word. I can already remember 2 examples: the click farms and internet.org, and I'm sure there are so many other examples. All of this makes me really sad, because the internet is the #1 tech tool that is improving the lives of so many people, and there is already so much greed involved.