For those of you, like me, who didn't know what "freebooting" is:
"the dubious practice where Business Pages and celebs can rip videos from elsewhere, repost the content on Facebook and grow their brands while robbing the content creators of views." (From the article)
It's a bit more specific than piracy, since piracy today is more commonly associated with an individual stealing content for personal use, or to resell the content itself.
Freebooting is certainly more specific than piracy, but I think you may have missed the word "like" in there. GP means that the word "freebooting" itself is not new, but its new meaning in today's context is (like "pirate") new.
So basically the majority of the top Instagram accounts. I'm curious to see what they do about that, because those accounts get huge doing absolutely nothing. Especially those "travel" accounts that rip off every other photographer.
"the dubious practice where Business Pages and celebs can rip videos from elsewhere, repost the content on Facebook and grow their brands while robbing the content creators of views."
So ... that is the definition of freebooting ...
But what is the definition of "believing that freebooting, and things like it, work at all ?"
Whether or not it works for the bad guy in this situation is an open question (maybe someone has researched it); there's certainly a perception that it does since it keeps happening.
But the commentary from those that are the victims indicate that this sort of thing could be very problematic for them. So I do hope that this and this sort of thing helps lock the bad actors out.
No, it's not. The 'boot' in 'freebooting' comes from the Dutch word 'buit' which means 'booty', the 'boot' in 'bootlegging' comes from boots you wear on your feet (in the leg of which you could hide a flask of illegal alcohol).
Ripped content - It's what made YouTube grow and what made FB Video grow. FB is taking steps to crack down on copyright theft now that the video platform is large enough (just like what YouTube did).
There's a significant difference between hosting old-media content in a discoverable way on the internet for the first time (i.e. TV and movie clips off your DVD collection) and re-hosting internet-native content under your own account.
The former actually provides a service: I like to be able to show people and revisit funny scenes from i.e. West Wing episodes, and often that prompts me to go re-watch the episode from a legitimate source. The latter has no net gain for the user over just linking, but screws over the OP.
Not that it's any more legal or ethical, but there's a large difference in perception between stealing content from large companies (media companies) to rehost on a free platform and stealing from starving artists and claiming it as your own. It is my understanding that YouTube grew largely by the former.
There needs to be CRC/SHA for video. Once that is figured out identifying these sorts of things will be trivial.
I would in fact pay someone to develop this as I think it is something humanity needs. Or I could pivot it into a startup and offer content creators a "safe harbor" to let them know whenever their stuff has been pirated.
Isn't this what YouTube calls content ID? They alert you that your content is up somewhere, then you have the option of monetizing it, or having it taken down.
Not quite trivial: people can crop, skew, vignette, mirror, timestretch and scale video to try to defeat it. YouTube's Content ID seems to be vulnerable to this sort of thing still.
I think that's why many of these systems focus on audio. It's harder to change in a way that beats fingerprinting but doesn't ruin the viewing experience.
Pretty standard modus operandi for technology start-ups, 'disrupt' the scene (AKA enable illegal/unlawful/unethical things). Then years later, officially notice you've been turning a blind eye and provide tools to discourage it.
fb did nothing about content ripped from YT and posted on FB. There are a few high profile FB users who only rip video from YT and post on FB. FB did nothing and YT didnt care at all.
so this is definitely a step in the right direction.
Is it just me or are there others who think the only one who wins here is Facebook? They are literally sucking up all original content, everywhere. They want you to upload your entire IP library to them so they can check and see if its being used "for you".
I dunno, it sounds to me like it's just a clone of youtube ContentID. In that sense, they're maybe doing it at their lawyers' behest to try and stop looming lawsuits.
So.. how is 'freebooting' different to posting on reddit/HN/imgur/$site ?
You're growing your 'brand' as a poster of interesting/funny things (as seen via Karma), I suppose that as long as these entities don't attempt to claim this media as 'original content', I don't really have a problem.
If anything, attributing to the original creator is as simple as pressing 'share status' on facebook, instead of posting a direct url to the content in question.
edit - I fundamentally misunderstood the term freebooting. Will leave comment intact so replies still make sense, but thank you to child posters for clearing up my misconception.
Freebooting is not posting a link to someone's original content. It is when you reupload the content to your page/channel/website, and then link that. The views (and ad revenue) go to the reuploader instead of the original creator.
90% of content on the default subreddits has been ripped from its original source and rehosted on imgur or gfycat. The remaining 10% are links to YouTube.
The people doing it aren't profiting from ads like they would by doing it on Facebook, but they're still taking away the pageviews from the original creator.
However, that rehosting is usually not to steal traffic, but because most of the webpages that host the original, would experience what is called the hug of death, when thousands of viewers suddenly flock to their website.
So linking to the original content, is best done as a addendum to the rehosted content, to still allow for viewers to check out the original creator.
Yes, I'm sure all the freebooters are just doing this to avoid the hug of death. 99% of the time I see no mention of the original content creator in any imgur link. Often times, someone further down in the comments will dig it up and tell people.
Another reason is that half of the time the original source has slow and shitty webpage. Standardized, mostly bullshit-free interface is what made imgur and gyfcat win.
This does however suggest something. The problem here seems similar to the problem of piracy in general, in that people choose content delivery format that sucks the least, and then delivery platform that they understand.
Consider the case of movie piracy (and for simplification let's exclude people pirating because they don't have money): people often torrent movies because they want to get a decent-quality mp4 file instead of a half-assed player and a third of an operating system that together deliver half an hour of unskippable ads and piracy warnings. Consider the case of videogames - when Steam showed up, piracy went from something everyone does to something shameful among gamers.
Or just today at work we're talking about a streaming site that serves soccer league games. One of my cow-orkers pointed out that this is about the only reasonable way to watch soccer games, because otherwise you'd have to buy subscription to half a dozen cable services - as different leagues have deals with different companies.
Now imgur is a no-bullshit source of images. People know and understand it. It's no surprise people prefer it, and for non-imgur sources you can often find requests to reupload the image to that site.
As for solutions - I don't have one. I don't believe reuploads themselves are a problem. Lack of culture that would encourage attribution is though. But the expectation that you can make money by posting content on the Internet is a bigger problem, IMO. Smart content creators know their work will be copied, reuploaded, shared without attribution, etc. and so they don't base their livelihood on posting stuff on the Internet. Those less smart end up complaining about unfairness, but that IMO makes as much sense as complaining that gravity is unfair. Digital works are inherently copyable, it is in their nature.
To be fair, this is actually a problem with the environment that goes way beyond the individual pieces of content, and is one of the reasons that Alan Kay thought that the Internet was professional but the Web was amateurish.
Alan Kay's idea was (paraphrasing) "It's great that we have message passing between client and server processes, but we really needed to take this idea and run with it, with each piece of content on the Web being some sort of network-hosted process which you communicated with. Then you by-default preserve provenance (who the author is and how it got here) and then you can integrate micropayments into browsers so that you can earn money for watching ads (and target the ads that you want to watch!) and then use that money to browse the content that you want to watch, etc., with by-default the content-creator reaping the micropayments of their content."
But because nobody solved this rather difficult problem, we have freebooting and you have to reload web pages whenever you change their source and re-navigate down to the menu that you care about, and Brendan Eich is now getting flak from people for trying to reinvent advertising on the internet etc...
No, but you can monetize videos on other platforms. Even if FB videos don't have ads, the rehoster is still taking away ad money from the original creator (but the rehoster doesn't get the money).
The views are on facebook rather than the originating post/platform because the actual video itself is ripped and posted. This damages rankings, analytics, SEO, editorial control and ad revenue.
It's not that different. It's trivial to game reddit by reposting someone else's dumb gif and get your account enough karma that the spam filters don't stop you from doing whatever you want until the end of time. It happens endlessly.
my understanding is tons of fb pages were simply people stealing a youtube video, reuploading it to facebook, and thus the OC creator never was getting credit/views/hits/ad revenue for the content. Even though youtube has archaic dmca takedown policies, it sort of prevents this type of thing from happening to such an obviously illegal degree.
I'll be curious to see how they will handle "strikes" against an account - will it be similar to YouTube, where 3 strikes shuts you down, or will it be more lenient?
I notice there's no recovery mechanism mentioned when it's not a DMCA takedown, other than "We'll tell you".
From a content creator standpoint, I believe Facebook is trying to "sprawl" into media-type endeavors and hosting. As in they'd rather have the super-cool-viral-video in their ecosystem instead of linking out to YouTube. This creates a lot of friction - the notion of enforcement at the potential cost of market growth. I agree it's a good thing they're doing this.
My guess is turf grab followed by backfilling features needed (demanded) by a mature ecosystem.
Started playing with Graph API. I was pleasantly surprised that it had matured with some user privacy preserving kabuki. Like issuing unique user ids per app. An earnest effort to make it harder to aggregate and correlate ids across apps. (Alas, deanonymization is pretty easy.)
>Do I own the copyright to something that I filmed from television or a live concert or sporting event on my own camcorder or phone? ... Just because you recorded a live event or publicly broadcasted show onto your own recording device, doesn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t infringing the rights of the person or company that owns the copyright to the television show or performance.
This is an area of copyright I have the biggest problem with. If I'm at a venue, copyright holders should not be able to exercise copyright claims over what I see/hear while attending, unless the ticket itself puts a restriction on recordation. In the latter case, that becomes a function of license enforcement that cannot be effected thru the DMCA.
Imagine you record a video with friends - the band is playing in the background. Copyright law allows the band to takedown the clip.
Again, the world where our main priority is assuring 'compensation' and 'rights' for our 'content' is the same one where rent-seeking assholes exploit artists.
Steve Miller's rant was only yesterday. The harder we let corporations ossify the notion that all knowledge should be owned and paid for every time it is used, the more we will suffer.
Finally, you can't steal what is given away free. It's time for a paradigm shift, humanity. Slay this dragon.
Not a native speaker so i might not get the point, but most if this content is free anyway but the creators are getting robbed from views an increasing their own reach while others directly benefit from that. So many dubious facebook "celebrities" that use this to extend their audience which they can then sell ads to, it is really sickening.
In the knowledge business world, the ability to do something requires a huge amount of capital to just get an initial product out the door.
For a photographer to take an amazing photo of Zion National Park, they have travel, equipment, and time expenses. In this case, how does the photographer get compensated for all of this if some celeb or background site takes the photo and writes on it: "My home on the range."
The huge back-end that is required to make something is the unseen portion of the economy, there should be a rights warehouse making it easy to put things on and declare usage fees.
*Edit: their to there, because I is grammatically correct.
I pretty much want to eradicate the knowledge business world. If the world-trotting celeb photographer goes extinct, so be it. I guarantee we will not lack for gorgeous photos of the world.
Just imagine if we had the computing power to start randomly generating images for every pixel combination. You could copyright every image possible before the photo was taken
Even for very small color space (e.g. 8-bit or 256 colors) and very small pictures (e.g. 32x32) the amount of possible images is for all intents and purposes infinite.
The moment that photograph becomes digital, it's worthless. Equipment, travel, time, none of that matters when the end result is an arbitrary configuration of bits which can be copied perfectly, ad infinitum. This truth applies to anything in a digital format. All of the books, movies, games, documents, video clips, photographs - all of it is worthless, and no one deserves compensation for any of it, regardless of the effort that went into making it.
The photographer would need to be be compensated for their time and effort beforehand, if at all, but the age when one can expect to be paid for content or knowledge seems to be rapidly coming to an end. "Freebooting" is only a problem because we've tried to make ownership and copyright work in a medium that renders them irrelevant, but really it's just the web working as intended.
Like a lot of people here, I benefit personally from being able to assert ownership over digital content, but I can also see the writing on the wall.
Speculation: The production of this page was likely handled by Marketing, which functionally likely sits in a different org within FB and doesn't have access to many eng resources. So, Marketing sees WP VIP as an easy way to get a site up by just running a credit card. Speaking from experience, I think this "outsourcing" is probably good – if there's indeed no engineering team dedicated to Marketing needs like this.
That said, I'm sure WP VIP will break down when Marketing's needs increase – such as when Marketing needs to do internationalization, or perform a timed launch of a new site/content update.
It's not really a hefty bill if you figure in the time and energy to put ops people into building an HA Wordpress platform that's equivalent to Wordpress VIP, when Facebook isn't a hosting company in the first place.
Probably because there's no one at Facebook or no infrastructure that is specifically setup for hosting stuff like this. Facebook is a product company, not a hosting company, so this makes perfect sense.
I work in the marketing department of a late stage technology start up and we face the same problem. We have lots of excellent people all over the company, but it's a tradeoff in terms of asking people to work on Wordpress hosting infra vs. just paying a service like Wordpress VIP to handle it.
I'm actually wondering the same thing. Have you seen the hosting cost? $10,000/month avg. Clearly they can handle traffic themselves. What's the advantage here?
"Prices for WordPress.com VIP Cloud Hosting start at $5000 per month for up to 5 websites. Our Self-Hosted services start at $15k per year. If that sounds like a good fit, get in touch!"
Seems like for $5k a month they can use it for 5 websites and $1k a website a month is worth the mindset of "set it and forget it".
"the dubious practice where Business Pages and celebs can rip videos from elsewhere, repost the content on Facebook and grow their brands while robbing the content creators of views." (From the article)