The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) reported on improvements to Meta’s Rights Manager anti-piracy feature, as well as “additional protections preventing newly-created accounts from live streaming via Facebook Live – a key measure in stopping pirates creating fresh accounts to avoid enforcement measures … (which were) launched and implemented in advance of UEFA EURO 2024.” UEFA said these were the result of collaboration between UEFA and Meta.
But in contrast with UEFA’s compliments, the rights advocacy group CreativeFuture found Meta’s efforts to be lacking. In a 2023 examination of Meta’s content protection efforts, CreativeFuture found multiple pirate groups in Facebook; both public and private, and also judged Meta’s claims “that it routinely catches 69%-94% of infringement on its platforms,” to ring hollow.
“Meta simply divided instances of infringement that it detected by the total amount of infringing content removed, with or without a rightsholder’s report,” and that “many copyright violations slip through the cracks,” said CreativeFuture.
CreativeFuture also found Rights Manager itself to be lacking in functionality, including inability to identify content that has been subjected to computationally-applied transformations (rotation, mirroring, texture-mapping) and matches that had been made in the past; among other errors.
CreativeFuture’s 2024 update
In 2023, Meta had reported receiving about 203,000 takedown notices per month. In 2024, CreativeFuture said that these increased to 657,000 in December 2022.
Meta’s previously-reported 68%-83% takedown rate remained the same – as percentages. But in terms of raw numbers, CreativeFuture reported that piracy is on the rise, based on a nearly 10% increase in the number of content items removed from Meta’s platforms.
About Rights Manager
Rights Manager “help(s) content owners protect their rights and manage their content at scale;” according to Meta, parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and other social apps. “Rights Manager is a video, audio and image-matching tool that we developed for rights holders of all sizes — from individual creators to media publishers, sports leagues, music labels and others — to identify and manage their content on Facebook and Instagram, including Live videos,” says the description on Rights Manager’s landing page.
Rights-holders must apply for protection under Rights Manager, and its criteria seem reasonable: Meta screens for whether or not the applicant has exclusive rights, or has been subject to take-down requests due to past infringement. Rejected applicants are subject to waiting periods before they can re-apply.
Further reading
UEFA and Meta committed to combatting online piracy. Article. June 27, 2024. UEFA (Union of European Football Associations)
Meta’s Piracy Checkup: An Interactive Quiz. Article. July 2024. CreativeFuture
Facebook’s Rights Manager is All Wrong. Article. May 24, 2023. CreativeFuture.
Why it matters
As Meta reportedly does not submit to independent audits, CreativeFuture believes that Meta is not fully forthcoming about its piracy-detection and anti-piracy practices.
Social media has become one of piracy’s leading awareness channels and it is disappointing that the social platforms’ anti-piracy protections seem designed to attract clicks rather than protect rights-holders’ interests.
The United States is long overdue in defending creative interests by updating anti-piracy and privacy policies.
