Facebook’s Freebooting Epidemic
Last year, Italian police recovered two stolen paintings from the kitchen of a retired Fiat auto worker. They had gone missing more than four decades earlier. The pair of masterworks, one by Paul Gauguin, the other by Pierre Bonnard, are worth an estimated $50 million, but the kitchen’s owner had picked them up 40 years ago for about $70, at a sort of “lost and found” clearance auction for unclaimed items left on trains.
Who misplaces $50 million worth of classic art on a train? Art thieves. In 1970, three men disguised as repairmen stole the paintings from the London home of Mathilda Marks-Kennedy, later abandoning them on a Paris-Turin train. The retired art lover had no idea they were stolen. He probably just thought they looked nice, so he hung them in his house. This guy wasn’t some black market kingpin, he was just a person who liked paintings, and in exercising that interest he ended up becoming an accidental pawn in an international heist.
I imagine if he had known what he had in his possession, he wouldn’t have hung them in the kitchen of all places. Have you ever tried to get splattered tomato sauce out of a Gaugin? Impossible.
Scenes just like this play out on Facebook every day, only instead of masterworks of art, the contraband is viral video, and you are the unwitting accomplice. Welcome to the Facebook freebooting epidemic.
(This is a very long post dealing with the world of online video, but I think it’s a very important post. I saved you Tumblr Dashboard readers from a text avalanche, but please click “Read more” to read the rest…)
“Freebooting” is a silly but oddly appropriate word invented by YouTubers CGP Grey and Brady Haran that means “taking online media and re-hosting it on your website without permission.” This is not the same as sharing or linking or embedding it from its original source. Freebooting means downloading it without permission from the creator or copyright holder and redistributing it for your own use, often for your own monetary gain. When it comes to video piracy in 2015, Facebook is ground zero.
Freebooting isn’t the same as sharing. I’m a huge fan of sharing, sharing is what the web is built on, and there’s nothing wrong with it, assuming it’s done with respect and proper attribution, but that is a conversation for another day. Freebooting is piracy. It is copyright infringement. It is stealing, and you or someone you know is almost certainly guilty of it.
Just so it’s abundantly clear, those videos you see playing on Facebook these days are not YouTube videos. Most of them used to be YouTube videos, but now they are hosted by and live on Facebook, often illegally. Facebook no longer lets people watch actual YouTube videos in the news feed, but we’ll save that for another time.
It might feel silly to get all serious about something like videos on the internet, but freebooting isn’t some innocent version of piracy, as if such a thing exists. The victims of this epidemic aren’t big, mean record companies or movie studios that people love to hate. Studios and corporations get plenty of videos freebooted, don’t get me wrong, but I have a hard time calling them victims. The victims of freebooting are real people, and this piracy avalanche is causing real damage.
Take the recent example of Destin Sandlin, creator of the YouTube channel Smarter Every Day. His video “TATTOOING Close Up (in Slow Motion)” was illegally downloaded from YouTube (which is really easy to do despite being against the YouTube terms of service), and uploaded to the Facebook page of UK lads’ mag ZOO Magazine, which you should not Google. It was later removed following a copyright claim by Destin, but not before it had racked up 18 million non-YouTube views. Destin didn’t tell me exactly how much money he lost out on in the process, only that it would have been enough to one day pay for a year of his daughter’s college tuition. The freebooted video got a huge number of likes and shares on Facebook, but la-di-da. Those are worth less than a Zimbabwean dollar to Destin and his family.
I know that many people don’t understand how YouTube creators make money off their videos in the first place. A few are lucky enough to be produced by a major media company (like me) or to have alternate sponsorship methods (like Subbable or Patreon), but most depend on ads, the utility of which is yet another conversation for another day.
To put it simply, Google (who owns YouTube), shares with the creator a (very small) percentage of the money made from you viewing ads on that video. When someone takes a video originally posted by one person on YouTube, and uploads it for themselves on Facebook, they are quite literally and in a very real way stealing money from the creator. It’s not “kind of stealing,” it is actual stealing. What ZOO did is no different than reaching into Destin’s pocket and taking money from his wallet.
When someone shares that stolen video, they become an unwitting accomplice, just like the Italian auto worker. And this might seem a harsh way of looking at it, but if you are clicking your mouse and sharing these illegal uploads with your friends and family, you are part of the problem.
I’m sure most people aren’t doing this on purpose. They probably aren’t even aware they’re doing it. To most people, a video is a video is a video, click-click-share, oh now your latté is ready, click, exit Facebook, never think of it again. We don’t stop and ask if the gas we put in our cars or the food we buy at the grocery store is stolen before we buy it. It just isn’t something that crosses people’s minds, because we live in a mostly law-abiding society and most people are pretty nice.
It’s time that people start paying attention, because Facebook certainly isn’t doing much to stem the tide, and if anything is going to change, it will depend on us being better citizens of the internet.
Luckily, it’s really easy not to distribute stolen stuff! Just follow these easy steps:
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And if you do catch someone freebooting? Destin put together the following guide to help you report the problem and to let people know the video is stolen.
To find out what you can do to help creators who get their work stolen, check out Destin’s new video about the Facebook Freebooting epidemic:
HOW DID IT GET THIS WAY? READ ON FOR THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS ABOUT ONLINE VIDEO
There’s no data, reliable or otherwise, on exactly how much video is illegally uploaded to Facebook every day. Have you even tried searching for a video on Facebook? It can’t be done. Seems like a bad system to me, but my hoodie isn’t worth a billion dollars so what do I know? My daily experience on Facebook, however anecdotal it may be, tells me that the answer to “How much?” is “Heaps. Loads. Tons.” I’d even bet that most of Facebook’s video views come from pirated content.
According to Facebook, they’re now delivering more than one billion video views every day. That’s still less than YouTube, which passed 4 billion per day back in 2012, but without a doubt Facebook has muscled their way into becoming a major player in online video. Honestly, I’d reckon that the “one billion views per day” stat is a bit inflated, since designing your algorithm to place automatically-playing videos in front of people’s eyes is an easy way to inflate the numbers, and looking at the stats behind the few videos I’ve uploaded to my show’s Facebook page, they count as little as one autoplayed second as a “view.” Take their data with a grain of salt.
The autoplay feature marks a significant departure in how video is consumed online. Facebook videos now just seem to appear out of the algorithmic aether, already moving as we scroll by, silently begging for just a few seconds’ pause, like a mime crossed with a carnival barker, a like if you’ve got time, and a share’d be even better, and why am I trapped in this box?
Remember the scourge of pop-up ads back in the old days of the web? This was before it was called “content” and before algorithms knew what we wanted better than we did. You’re minding your own business, doing whatever we did on the web before Google came along. Suddenly, one errant click would unleash an avalanche of flashing windows, sending us frantically clicking X’s before anyone noticed the XXX ads all over the screen. With autoplay, I know I’m not the only one who feels a tinge of déjà vu.
When I see an autoplay video on my news feed, I can’t help but think we’re undergoing a version of A Clockwork Orange’s fictional Ludovico technique, our eyes pinned open, the algorithm our straightjacket, only we’re watching puppies and workout fails instead of ultraviolence (although some of those treadmill falls are pretty violent… LOL ouch!), and instead of the government, it’s brought to us by the social media manager of the local FM radio morning show. Seriously, have you noticed how much viral piracy comes from radio stations? It makes no sense. If I were to tap the screen to turn the sound on (can you imagine if Facebook videos had sound on by default? *shudder*), I’d half expect a bit of the ol’ Ludwig van to come pouring out.
The Ludovico technique was designed as aversion therapy, a way to get someone to stop doing something, but Facebook video is determined to do exactly the opposite. Recent business moves make it clear that Zuckerberg and company are doubling down on video, and no longer just as a place to share it, but to host it directly.
For a while now, Facebook’s mission has been less and less about serving up the internet, and more about becoming the internet. Business-wise, it makes sense. It’s in Facebook’s best interests to keep you on their site looking at their ads. And as Facebook sees hints that they are losing “engagement” with the proverbial “key demographic”, naturally they see video as a way to draw those people back while simultaneously making Facebook attractive to advertisers who would like nothing more than have a new way to force you watch their ads… because did you know advertisers employ hundreds of people whose job it is to disguise ads as viral videos?! We don’t want America’s marketing professionals going hungry, do we?
Video is obviously good for business, but right now I think Facebook is getting it wrong. YouTube is far from a perfect company, but since the beginning they have respected individual creators a cornerstone of their business. YouTube gives their users money in return for filling up their site with content that other users can watch after they click through an ad, it’s a completely bonkers and brilliant business plan.
Facebook is focused on the consumption of content, and they are privileging their own content above all others, which is completely within their rights. But by failing to curb the freebooting epidemic, Facebook is sending a clear message that they don’t value creators or their intellectual property, they only value the content. Again, that’s their right, but I find it ironic that a social network built around people is really not at all about people anymore. Of course, none of us should be so naive as to assume that a billion-dollar web company is supposed to care about us as people, but if it’s hard to be extend a welcoming hand to creators while you’re giving them the finger with the other.
Facebook will say that they have a system in place for creators to report copyright infringement and get their videos taken down. They’ll say copyright infringement is against their terms of service. Is this enough? Are they going to pay people like Destin for lost income.
YouTube, in contrast, has an extensive Content ID system that automatically scans for copyrighted material, and to date it has taken $1 billion from freebooters and put it back in creators’ pockets. YouTube also enforces a three-strikes policy for repeat offenders, although that has been abused in the past. There are so many repeat offenders on Facebook that they’re impossible to mention, yet their pages stay up. The technology exists to prevent freebooting and repair its damage, but Facebook seems unwilling to implement it.
Memo from Mark Zuckerberg: “First, do whatever it takes to fill up the site with video content, and later we’ll figure out how to do it right.”
I’ll make a not-so-bold prediction: Within the year, Facebook will begin monetizing videos and sharing ad revenue with the people who post videos, similar to how YouTube does. Facebook’s recent deal with the NFL means this move might not be far off. Without a real effort to protect the intellectual property of people who put videos on Facebook, whether they’re TV networks or taxi drivers, this system is doomed to abuse and distrust.
I am a huge supporter of sharing and the open exchange of information. As Austin Kleon so wonderfully synthesized in his book Steal Like An Artist, most, if not all, creative work is built on what we draw from others and reassemble for ourselves. But stealing from an artist is an entirely different thing. It’s time Facebook stopped being an accomplice in such massive theft.