It’s easy to ignore stolen videos being posted to your website when the people that they belong to are just regular users, but now that Facebook has become one of the world’s top video-sharing platforms, advertisers and publishers are starting to post their own content, and they’re much harder to ignore. In order to crack down on stolen videos being uploaded, Facebook has introduced a new video matching tool that will allow a handful of its partners to quickly identify stolen videos and have them removed.
Facebook didn’t get to be one of the largest video streamers on the web without making a few enemies. Unfortunately, up to this point, a lot of those enemies were the people actually creating cool video content for the site. Today, Facebook is trying to rectify its poor management of controlling video piracy on its site and appease video creators who have been getting kind of pissed off at the site with a series of new updates. Facebook currently uses a program called Audible Magic to identify when someone uploads a video that violates someone else’s intellectual property. Facebook says Audible Magic does so through “audio fingerprinting technology,” which identifies videos with identical audio tracks and prevents them from reaching people’s feeds. In practice, it’s been far from perfect and is much less refined than YouTube’s Content ID system which video publishers seem to have much more positive things to say about. Indeed, it’s been reported that nearly 70% of Facebook’s most popular videos are freebooting re-uploads.
