Facebook is mostly to blame for Willy Foo’s copyright infringements

Image credit: Symbols&Emoticons

You’ve probably read the story of how Singaporean photographer Willy Foo had his Facebook page removed by the social network for copyright infringement. That’s two million likes and years of hard work flushed down the drain.

Willy was roundly castigated by readers for flouting copyright laws, and rightly so. Ripping videos without permission is IP infringement, no matter how you slice and dice it. Willy walked on thin ice, and as a content creator himself, he surely knew it.

But now that I have that out of the way, it’s time to address the big blue elephant in the room: Facebook is mostly to blame for creating this ugly mess in the first place.

Consider how Facebook’s native video feature succeeded initially. Celebrities like Tyrese Gibson boosted their Facebook pages by ripping off videos and sharing them under their own names. It’s a well-known practice called “freebooting.”

Here’s a staggering fact: about 72.5 percent of Facebook’s most popular videos were freebooted. And who loses out? Original content creators.

Take for example Destin Sandlin, a YouTube star with millions of subscribers. He did a video that got 20 million views in nine months.

Later, someone ripped that video, stripped out all references to Destin, and published it on Facebook. It got 18 million views in the first two days.

Meanwhile, Destin earned zilch from the ripped video. Facebook was happily racking up advertising revenue.

Robbing content creators

So let’s recap what we’ve learned here. Facebook’s video feature succeeded because it rode on pirated videos. It kept all the ad revenue for itself, leaving original content creators out in the cold.

Its algorithms favored native video content over stuff from YouTube, and as a result, led to freebooted videos racking up the views.

Consumers like us largely don’t give a shit, because who doesn’t like free stuff?

That’s not to say, of course, that Facebook wants pirated videos to succeed. But there’s a conflict of interest: it’s benefitting directly from rip-offs. Content creators, who are ultimately serfs in Facebook’s vast kingdom, are rightly suspicious about its intent.