If you are a copyright owner of a video that has been copied or pirated without your permission, Facebook is making it easier for you to police the social platform for unauthorized and pirated videos — and then either monitor or block them, or potentially make money from them.
Facebook’s Rights Manager allows copyright holders to identify unauthorized video sharing based on reference files. But using the system has largely been a manual process, unless rights owners developed hooks from their own automated systems into the Rights Manager’s API.
Facebook now is directly integrating Rights Manager with services from three third-party providers —Zefr, Friend MTS, and MarkMonitor — to provide new options to automate such tasks. Although Facebook doesn’t charge any fees to use Rights Manager, the third-party partners do.
Zefr: Zefr’s RightsID system was originally created for YouTube. Through Zefr’s access to Facebook’s video-search API, it can help rights holders find intellectual property via descriptive search; Zefr also will offer clients the capability to manage the queues of automated matches returned by Rights Manager.
Mark Monitor: MarkMonitor provides antipiracy-screening services for on-demand and live-streaming video.
Friends MTS: U.K.-based Friend MTS’s services for TV broadcasters let them find illegal live-streams of their channels
Facebook’s Rights Manager lets content owners create automated rules to determine what actions to take when it finds a copyright-infringing video. They can block the video from being viewed; leave the video up and monitor it for activity; or claim a share of any advertising revenue generated if an ad break runs during the video. In addition, rights holders can choose to manually review the videos that are flagged as a match.
Content owners must be approved to access to Facebook’s Rights Manager tool, via an application available at rightsmanager.fb.com.