
Facebook’s Piracy Problem - wesd
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/07/freebooting_stolen_youtube_videos_going_viral_on_facebook.html
======
plorg
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.

~~~
pen2l
When did this happen?

In my experiences, Youtube these days are pretty responsive to even the small
guys in settling out problems of this nature.

~~~
magicalist
Yeah, this would have had to have happened two or three years ago or more.
After a ContentID claim you file is disputed the video is restored and you
have to file a real DMCA takedown notice. If that gets disputed, the video is
again restored (though you'll likely end up with ten days of it taken down)
and you have to file a lawsuit, same as any other DMCA takedown.

------
hackuser
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outdated.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).

~~~
talon88
"Perhaps financial renumeration, while fair, isn't entirely necessary"

Is it that in your world, eating and paying the rent isn't necessary either?

'Many' creative people sounds like some programmers, which is somewhat small
subset of all creatives. I'd be surprised if the majority of creative people —
artists, writers, actors, and more — would happily go about saying that
financial renumeration doesn't matter to them.

Destin, for example, puts a lot of effort into his videos and his work.
Financial renumeration not being necessarily inevitably means Destin does
something else for the majority of his time and does Smarter Ever Day less (if
at all). This is almost certainly the same for every other artist out there.
Sure — maybe all art isn't necessary. Maybe some of it is crap. But saying
that being paid to be creative isn't necessarily means that you get very
little art, if at all.

~~~
jessaustin
_But saying that being paid to be creative isn 't necessarily_ [sic] _means
that you get very little art, if at all._

Humans have always created art. Modern conceptions of intellectual property
have not always existed. Why would art depend on that?

~~~
saidajigumi
Because here, in the post-industrial world, it's _very_ hard to make a living
from one-off works of craftsmanship. That didn't used to be the case, when
that was the only way to get things made. It happens today, but the economics
make it an unusual situation. The labor involved forces the per-unit prices to
be stratospheric, vastly limiting the market.

But we have an alternative: leverage digital technology's nigh-zero marginal
costs and charge very reasonable prices to large numbers of people.

The idea that because the _marginal_ cost is zero that the _cost_ should be
zero is a horribly greedy devaluation of creative labor.

So I'm all for new economic structures, but AFAICT no one's stepped up with a
better way that's actually proven to allow creative folks to continue to make
a living. (Or that even has a snowball's chance once tried outside of armchair
philosophizing.)

One last thought, since it's universally sizable corporations who control
those digital distribution channels... do we REALLY want to cede even more
power over content to these entities? If we just drop IP laws, that further
enriches these corps at the cost of individual and/or small creators. That
makes no sense to me whatsoever.

~~~
hackuser
> If we just drop IP laws, that further enriches these corps at the cost of
> individual and/or small creators. That makes no sense to me whatsoever.

A good question, but I'm not sure. Those large corporations produce a lot of
IP; maybe the small guy will benefit more than the big guy. Remember we're all
stealing from and building on each other's IP. Imagine if all the proprietary
software was open source, from OS X to Office to SunOS to SAS to Mathematica
to Photoshop to AutoCAD to Google's search algorithms.

It would be a dream for many to be able to study, learn from, and reuse that
code. It would be like the IP of the academic world, which generally is open
and reusable by others.

~~~
raquo
> Imagine if all the proprietary software was open source, from OS X to Office
> to SunOS to SAS to Mathematica to Photoshop to AutoCAD to Google's search
> algorithms

Most of this wouldn't even exist if it _had_ to be open-source from the start.

~~~
hackuser
I agree that's a possibility, and it's the obvious concern. I'm trying to
challenge our (mine included) common notion.

My 'radical idea' is that maybe they would exist. What if we had a system that
provided a payment mechanism but did away with IP restrictions, for example?
Consider how most of science is funded and shared, for example. Massive
projects like the LHC and space probes are funded, and their data is openly
shared. I'm not saying that the exact same system would work for software, but
that there are other systems that work very well.

I'd expect that with 'open' technology, innovation would be faster and
products would be better, as everyone could use and learn from best-in-class
tech.

------
willlma
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...](http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Going-Science-T-
Shirt-Scientists/dp/B006FCNWNY/ref=sr_1_1)) 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
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?

~~~
bmelton
The people who sell the shirts? No.

The people who manufacture the shirts? Yes, at least in theory.

------
mosquito242
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).

~~~
stevenh
I wish Google would start fighting dirty.

Want to access Facebook mobile? Hope you have an iPhone, because Google pushed
a mandatory update last night which banned Facebook from all Android devices.

Want to access Facebook through Chrome? Sorry, it seems that site has been
flagged as a malicious piracy hub; however, you might enjoy this 302 redirect
to an automatically-generated clone of your Facebook profile hosted on a safer
alternative called Google Plus.

~~~
Tyr42
That's when you get slapped with an antitrust lawsuit.

~~~
crgt
I could maybe see an antitrust lawsuit if Google dropped Facebook from search,
because of their dominant market share there. But neither Android nor Chrome
is a monopoly, so it's unclear to me how much legal risk they have if they
stopped playing nice with Facebook there. Am I missing something?

------
AdieuToLogic
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._Y...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._YouTube,_Inc).

2 -
[https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms](https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms)

~~~
wodenokoto
Back in the old YouTube days, people couldn't understand why big players
wouldn't allow them to watch music videos on YouTube, when it was literally
the only place to do so.

There was no legal Netflix alternative, so people felt much more okay with
watching shows there as well.

Now it's the little guy not only getting hurt by two big players cooperating,
there even is a well functioning alternative!

I'm not saying this is different from a legal point of view, but for small
content consumers it definitely feels different.

~~~
AdieuToLogic
I get what you're saying. And I agree that _any company_ which profits by the
uncompensated works of others is wrong.

My point is that there are many comments here which are along the lines of
"string Facebook up on the nearest tree because they allow people to put stuff
up which is owned by a content creator who published it on Youtube!!!" The
logic being, as you imply, that the content creators on Youtube are not being
compensated.

And how is that different from Youtube profiting from _their_ users ripping
off content creators and putting it up on Youtube?

My closing point was that I believe there are better reasons to take the
pitchforks and torches out regarding Facebook.

------
finnyspade
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
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
didn't the article say 2 days? That's not exactly horrible response time.

------
rwmj
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.

~~~
corin_
Wouldn't DMCA protect Facebook from legal action here?

~~~
acomjean
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
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
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.

------
stevenh
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
The answer is always the same in America, Facebook has a better legal team.

------
austenallred
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.

~~~
pxlpshr
If there are a few simple things to beat a vast majority of content theft, I
feel like you should author a blog post instead of keeping it private to an
email conversation.

~~~
austenallred
EDIT: on second thought, I'm not so sure telling spammers exactly how you're
policing them isn't always the best thing to do. Emailing me is best, and if I
think it's appropriate I'll publish.

------
dimino
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
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
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
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.

------
solidpy
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.

~~~
JusticeJuice
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.

------
rythie
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-
mil...](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/apr/29/ed-miliband-
russell-brand-video-highlights)). 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.

~~~
maaaats
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.

------
scotty79
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.

------
Mithaldu
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
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
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
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
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.

~~~
makomk
That works quite well for music because you usually want to listen to it more
than once - I actually started buying music again because of Grooveshark. It
doesn't make sense for videos and I suspect you know that.

------
yalogin
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
> 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)

------
kevando
Didn't youtube start the same way?

~~~
larrys
Sure but from my understanding of the article youtube isn't really the
aggrieved party it's the creators that are.

~~~
qq66
YouTube is an aggrieved party since they are losing money too, but there's far
more popular sympathy for the individual creators.

------
jokoon
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.

------
msoad
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)

------
BillyParadise
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)

------
amelius
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
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?

------
runn1ng
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.

------
jakejake
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.

------
phkahler
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.

------
personjerry
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.

~~~
spuz
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.

------
ericras
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.

------
benhamner
A more accurate title: Youtube's Facebook Piracy Problem

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superuser2
I don't understand how this is "Facebook's" piracy problem. It sounds like the
British newspaper's piracy problem.

~~~
brokentone
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.

~~~
tedunangst
This may be the first post in the history of HN that isn't completely negative
about content ID.

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

~~~
jboggan
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-...](http://www.fullscreen.com/2015/05/21/fullscreen-uploader-is-here/)

~~~
leephillips
"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.

~~~
taejo
What does the content creator gain from the user seeing a black box? That's
way worse than them seeing the content and the creator getting money for it,
from both the user and the creator's perspective.

~~~
leephillips
Firstly, the copyright holder gets to decide what's in his best interest, not
you.

Secondly, just playing along, what he gets is his audience going to the
legitimate source for the content, where he will get his full measure of
remuneration, where the work will be seen in its proper context, and where he
can ensure that it's not tampered with.

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habitue
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
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.

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

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

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

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

~~~
sparkzilla
OK, check the IM messages at the bottom of this post:
[http://gawker.com/5486554/mark-zuckerberg-will-personally-
ha...](http://gawker.com/5486554/mark-zuckerberg-will-personally-hack-your-
facebook-account)

------
001sky
This title seems (a bit) like blaming the stock exchange for insider trading.

~~~
belorn
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
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.

