It will soon be harder to illegally share copyrighted videos on Facebook, thanks to new tracking tools that the world's largest social network announced at its F8 developers conference in San Francisco. Called Rights Manager, the new tool will allow creators to establish rules for how their individual videos may be used on Facebook.
Video owners can upload a list of the content they want to monitor and protect, as well as whitelist specific pages or profiles that have permission to use their copyrighted videos. Publishers must apply to use the new service. Facebook said it's the first iteration of what it hopes will be a more streamlined process for reporting copyright infringement than manually reviewing copyright complaints.
In addition to Rights Manager, the company also announced updates to its intellectual property policies, and said it will be "building up our operations team" to handle reports of IP infringement.
This also applies to live videos. "We check every Facebook Live video stream against files in the Rights Manager reference library, and if a match surfaces, we'll interrupt that live video," Facebook says.
The explosion of its video content has made Facebook a relative newcomer to dealing with large numbers of copyright violations. It's unclear how the new Rights Manager will address the problem of illegitimate video takedown requests, which Google has grappled with for years. Last fall, the search engine giant announced that it would cover up to $1 million in legal costs for YouTube video creators who are sued for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act but are —in Google's opinion—actually using that footage legally.