Facebook Faces Copyright Issues Amid Video Explosion

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From Copyright and Technology:

It’s fairly well established by now — thanks to court decisions like Viacom v. YouTube and UMG v. Veoh — that online service operators have no legal duty to proactively police their services for potential copyright infringement.  But that doesn’t mean that some services don’t do it anyway.  The biggest example is Google’s Content ID system for YouTube, which uses fingerprinting technology to flag uploads that contain copyrighted material.

The reason why Google implemented Content ID (in 2007) is simple: Google figured out a way to make money from it.  Copyright owners can choose to allow their content to be uploaded and take a share of revenue from ads that Google places in or alongside the video clips.  The major record companies participate in this arrangement for the vast majority of their content.  They aren’t thrilled with the per-stream revenue they are getting, but both sides agree that it’s better than having YouTube just block everything that matches.

Enter Facebook. Over the past couple of years, Facebook has become a bigger and bigger video-sharing service, one that is starting to rival YouTube in audience size and arguably exceed it in audience engagement.  This has led to “freebooting,” or capturing video streams from YouTube and re-posting them on Facebook.  And not just major record label or Hollywood studio content, but any popular YouTube video.

After a crescendo of complaints from native YouTube stars as well as the music industry, Facebook announced that it would be building a “Rights Manager” system based on the Audible Magic fingerprinting technology that it has been using for years to scan uploaded audio.  (YouTube also used Audible Magic before Content ID was implemented based on its own technology.)

Facebook’s Rights Manager allows copyright holders to “claim” their content and decide what they want Facebook to do with it.  Yet unlike Google’s Content ID, Rights Manager ultimately allows only two options: just allow the upload (and offer usage statistics to the copyright owner), or report it to the copyright owner as a potential violation.  There is no option to block the upload automatically.  Instead, rights holders must receive notices of matched content and then issue takedown notices to Facebook using Facebook’s DMCA process; then Facebook will “promptly remove those videos in response to valid reports.”

. . . .

The NMPA (National Music Publishers Association, the trade group for U.S. music publishers) has raised concerns about the growing amount of videos of cover versions of copyrighted songs (compositions) being uploaded on Facebook without licensing.  Recording a cover version of a song that’s in copyright normally requires a mechanical license from the music publisher.  Under the law, the publisher can’t refuse to grant the mechanical license, but the performing artist must notify the publisher (if the publisher is known), and the artist must pay a standard royalty.

This requires that Facebook detect cover versions of musical compositions.  Audible Magic can’t do that. Acoustic fingerprinting technology is good at matching recordings, but it’s not designed to match cover versions of compositions.

Link to the rest at Copyright and Technology