With Facebook recently passing YouTube as the website with the most video views, I thought it was an appropriate time to take a look at exactly how Facebook has done this, specifically addressing the problem of freebooting. For those of you who do not know, when you post a video to Facebook from YouTube, it will normally appear with a thumbnail, like this. When you post a YouTube video to Facebook like this, every view is counted towards the creator of the YouTube video’s views, giving them advertisement revenue from viewing the video. However, Facebook has its own native video player that is separate from YouTube videos. You can spot these videos because they are the ones that will not have thumbnails and that will automatically play when you scroll past them on your newsfeed.
Facebook systematically encourages people to use its own native player over YouTube links by auto-playing its own videos but requiring YouTube videos to be clicked on (due to the thumbnail that it puts up), and by giving ad revenue to large partners who post popular videos in its native player. Now at first glance, this does not seem to be much of an issue, as Facebook naturally has a right to promote its own player and its own product, especially on its own website. Problems emerge, however, when people freeboot videos from YouTube.
For those of you who do not know, freebooting is when someone downloads a video from YouTube, re-uploads it to the native Facebook player, and then posts the video on their timeline (sometimes but not always claiming the video as their own original content instead). Freebooting can technically be done to any website, including YouTube, however YouTube in particular offers strong protections within its own website against freebooting. Since Facebook has become the other giant of online videos and has actually encouraged freebooting on its website, I will be focusing on Facebook here.
Freebooting is online theft, as it steals ad revenue and views from the original creator. Freebooting has created a massive problem for original content creators on YouTube, many of whom frequently see their videos stolen and re-uploaded to Facebook. On Facebook, these videos go viral, gaining millions in views and thousands in ad revenue, all of which the original creator sees no benefit from. If you are interested in seeing YouTube creators talk about this issue themselves and how it affects their work, you can see Smarter Every Day, Kurzgesat, h3h3, and Hank and John Green talk about in the linked articles and videos.
Facebook has been anything but a good partner to content creators in this struggle. If a freebooted video is going viral on Facebook, it has no incentive to pull the video, since Facebook is now the one making all the money from the ad revenue. Because of this, Facebook frequently does not take down freebooted videos, or waits until the video has already gone viral and gotten the vast majority of all the views it will ever get before taking the video down. Facebook’s entire video-sharing empire is based almost exclusively on stolen and freebooted videos, with something close to 72.5% of Facebook’s most-viewed videos being stolen from YouTube. Clearly, this is a massive problem that needs addressing.
Larger channels such as the ones mentioned above are lucky enough that they can have their videos freebooted constantly and still survive. However, for many smaller channels, the extra ad revenue could mean the difference between their channel staying alive or dying out. Even among the bigger channels like Smarter Every Day or Kurzgesat, who take the time to research issues extremely thoroughly and can put literally hundreds of hours into a single video, the ad revenue and exposure that they miss out on because of freebooting is a huge injustice and instead of them making money off of the content that they created, Facebook is simply stealing the money for themselves.
In more traditional forms of business, there are safeguards against this sort of thing. Inventors and entrepreneurs can apply for patents and copyrights to protect and safeguard their intellectual property. Intellectual property and copyright law is traditionally one of the most protected portions of the American legal system, however, since all of these YouTube creators are making their product on the internet, there are very few laws that protects them from Facebook freebooting their videos and stealing their views and money. And where there are laws that do protect creators, Facebook uses its fine stable of corporate lawyers to intimidate and suppress any lawsuits or claims that it has done wrong.
So what can you do to help combat this problem?
The first thing you should know is that there are several Facebook pages that are notorious for freebooting videos. In particular, SoFlo (aka SoFlo Antonio) and singer Tyrese Gibson are notorious freebooters. I highly encourage you to unlike their pages if you have liked them in the past and to not watch their videos.
In general, pages that are centered around sharing videos but who are clearly not content creators themselves, such as pages like “Best Vines,” “Cat Videos,” or “Funniest and Craziest Videos” are pages which have no purpose other than freebooting and gaining revenue from freebooting. Please unlike these pages and encourage your friends to do the same.
The second thing you can do is to comment on freebooting videos that they are stolen, do not watch them! You can even alert the original content creators that their work has been freebooted (original creators will often not even know their video has been freebooted, and they cannot take any legal recourse is they don’t know that it has happened), and encourage your friends to do the same. While it is hard to tell if a video had been freebooted, if you see that a video is in the Facebook player (not a YouTube link) and it has an insignia or other marking of a specific channel that does not match with who posted the video to Facebook, that video has been freebooted (this chart is a helpful guide). Finally, when you see a video on the Facebook player, consider trying to look up the video on YouTube and/or other websites that are friendlier to creators. In general, spread the word, and hopefully, Facebook will be forced to take action if this becomes an issue that enough of the public cares about.
