Hashem Al-Ghaili
3 July 2022
Hey Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg! Creating video content for Facebook is becoming a nightmare!
I have been creating video content and publishing it on Facebook since 2015. Thanks to my video content, this page has become the world’s largest Facebook page for science communication, reaching a global audience of nearly 34 million followers. Here is the problem: this is by far the worst period to be a video content creator on Facebook! Why? It’s due to a feature called Rights Manager, which is being misused by many publishers and creators.
In 2016, Facebook launched a feature called Rights Manager. The tool was intended to help publishers, artists and content creators to protect their copyrights and prevent freebooting and intellectual property theft. It was later expanded to cover Instagram content. The idea is that, when you upload a video, this video goes to an ID system or a reference database. Then you can choose what happens to those who upload the same video material on the platform. You can claim their ad revenues, block their video, or get it deleted. You can also instruct the algorithm to put a link in the video that directs to your page. Everything was going smoothly at first, until the last 2 years. Rights Manager became one of the worst tools on the platform.
Aside from creating our own original animations or shooting our own footage, many content creators, including myself, use stock footage. Now, imagine someone seeing a cool piece of stock footage somewhere on a stock footage website like Pond5, Videohive, Shutterstock, etc. They then license that stock footage and use it in one of their videos. Because they’re the first one to use that stock footage, Rights Manager will immediately register their page as the sole owner of that piece, even though it’s not theirs. It’s available online for anyone to license it and use it on their video. If someone else licenses that stock footage piece and uses it for a video, that video will be falsely claimed by someone who doesn’t even own the rights to the footage. They collect ad revenues, put a link to their own page or request the video to be taken down if they wanted. Worst case scenario? If you dispute their copyrights claim, not everyone is good enough to acknowledge that they don’t own the footage. Many of them insist that they own it. And if you reach out to Facebook directly, don’t expect the issue to be resolved.
This has been happening with footage that is even part of the Public Domain, like footage from NASA or footage from the 1920s. It’s even happening with footage that was released by universities and research institutions under Creative Commons License, which you’re allowed to use if you give them proper credit. With Rights Manager, the concept of Fair Use is not protected at all. This whole thing is also happening with music and sound effects that you can license from third party websites.
The problem becomes worse when you spend months creating an original video and use a 2-second sound effect that you licensed from somewhere. Then that sound effect turns out to be registered already by whoever used it first. They will claim your months of hard work. Rights Manager is basically a first-come first-serve feature that is making creating video content on Facebook and Instagram a nightmare! It rewards only one group of creators: those who upload the reference material first, even if they don't own it.
Thousands of Facebook pages are affected by this; making content creators think twice before publishing anything on Facebook. It’s one of the reasons I don’t publish as many videos as I used to. Rights Manager can be a powerful tool if Facebook prevented it from being misused for false copyright claims. If it remains as it is now, it will cause a mass exodus of content creators who will look for better alternatives. Content Creators are one of the reasons users stick around, and if we can't feel creative due to Rights Manager restrictions, there is no point staying.
I tried to raise this issue directly to Meta, but unfortunately the response has rather been disappointing. Hence, I decided to post it here because you deserve to know why you’re not seeing as many videos from my page as you used to. We all deserve a platform that makes our presence on it an enjoyable experience. I hope Meta will work on this so we can continue publishing content here.
With love,
Hashem
