Facebook Fires Back at Video Theft Accusations: 'We Take Intellectual Property Rights Very Seriously'

Updated, 9:30 a.m. PT, August 3rd

Facebook fired back at the accusations made by Green on Monday, with a company spokesperson vowing the company takes intellectual property very seriously.

“This is not new to Facebook. We have a number of measures in place to address potential infringements on our service. For years we’ve used the Audible Magic system to help prevent unauthorized video content. We also have reporting tools in place to allow content owners to report potential copyright infringement, and upon receiving a valid notice we remove unauthorized content. We also suspend accounts of people with repeated IP violations when appropriate.”

The statement added that the company is exploring new ways to help IP owners identify and manage potential infringing content.

“This is a significant technical challenge to solve, but we have a team working on it and expect to have more to share later this year. As with all products and experiences on Facebook, we’re listening to feedback, and want to continue to improve our content management tools for people and publishers.”

Previously

YouTube creator Hank Green accused Facebook of leveraging stolen videos to beef up its stats on Sunday.

In a Medium piece titled “Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video,” Green claimed the social media giant has been taking advantage of stolen video in order spike its video numbers.

Citing a recent Ogilvy and Tubular Labs report, Green noted the 1,000 most popular Facebook videos of 2015’s first quarter were 725 stolen re-uploads.

“Just these 725 ‘freebooted’ videos were responsible for around 17 BILLION views last quarter,”he wrote. “This is not insignificant, it’s the vast majority of Facebook’s high volume traffic. And no wonder, when embedding a YouTube video on your company’s Facebook page is a sure way to see it die a sudden death, we shouldn’t be surprised when they rip it off YouTube and upload it natively.”

Green suggested the company’s algorithm is a big part of the issue problem. “Facebook’s algorithms encourage this theft,” he wrote.

Facebook will use the stolen videos and get 99.9 percent of the views before taking the videos down, Green claimed. He also says it’s “inexcusable” for a company of Facebook’s magnitude to operate this way.

“It’s a little inexcusable that Facebook, a company with a market cap of $260 BILLION, launched their video platform with no system to protect independent rights holders,” Green wrote. “It wouldn’t be surprising if Facebook was working on a solution now which they can roll out conveniently after having made their initial claims at being the biggest, most important thing in video.”

Facebook did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.

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