Facebook is taking the ever-present issue of freebooting and copyright infringement by the horns with the release of Rights Manager.
The social networking giant's Rights Manager is essentially an admin tool for Pages, allowing content creators to upload video clips that they want to have exclusivity on. Once uploaded, Facebook takes care of the rest by monitoring how many copies of these videos appear on the site and notifies the copyright owners of the clips.
Unlike some of its more recent features, Rights Manager comes as a matter of necessity in order to combat the surge of stolen videos that pop on the social network.
To be fair, the act of reposting videos isn't much of an issue in of itself - so long as proper credit is given. However, that is precisely the problem: many buisness-oriented pages use YouTube videos, TV clips or content from other pages to increase user engagement but fail to indicate where said content was taken from - a practice known as freebooting.
Rights Manager provides video owners with various methods to protect their property, such as allowing publishers certain options depending on the number of times a video was copied, what page used it without consent or the number of views it received. For example, publishers can directly influence these occurrences by whitelisting certain pages that have permission to utilize its videos.
There is also a monitoring option for Live Video, aimed to prevent people from rebroadcasting pay-per-view content, such as WWE events. It's certainly a nice step on Facebook's part, but its still possible on rival services like Twitter's Periscope, so the move means little if looking at the bigger picture.
Lastly, two control options exist for Rights Manager depending on whether you're a smaller entity or a larger company: a dashboard and specially designed API, respectively.
Overall, this is a notable change for Facebook, which has long been viewed as being relatively soft on content rights. However, in some people's eyes, it might be too late for Facebook, as they believe that this laissez-faire attitude toward freebooting and copyright infringement is what caused the NFL to grant Twitter the rights to stream its football games rather than Facebook.
In the meantime, users can go to this page to check Rights Manager out. It's not available for public use quite yet, but owners of video content can apply to join the program.
