The Facebook “ethos” as it were, appears to be, “Let’s be evil.”
Freebooting, if you’ve never heard of it, is the art and science of ripping a video off of YouTube and uploading it through the Facebook video system. Facebook then uses the video and makes money off of the ads around it while the creator undertakes a tedious journey to have it removed.
I’m a copyright skeptic in a lot of ways, and I think the phrase “intellectual property” needs to die a horrible death for many reasons I’m not going to go into, but Facebook is getting away with murder here, and all it does is complicate the Internet. I suspect they have a class-action lawsuit against them in the making, but that’s another issue. What I suspect even more, however, is that no one really knows this is happening. BoingBoing hasn’t even talked about it, and this is sort of thing BB normally covers. With that, I present you with a few video explainers and calls to arms.
I am constantly linking to the original source materials in my friends reposts of booted videos!
Like seriously, views are money people! Give your clicks to the content creators not FB!
In general, I think large corporations tend to invoke intellectual property when it benefits them, but ignore it when it doesn’t. I can think of no better example then the recording industry pissed over bootlegs except when it was in markets that had no penetration into… but once they got access, they attempt to shut any sort of bootlegging that cuts into their margins. I doubt anyone in the industry was particularly upset about the Soviet x-ray bootlegs in the 40s and 50s, for example and probably tried to encourage it by seeking to break down the margins of the iron curtain via radio, to help drive ground-up demand.
So, in this case, I’m sure that facebook would defend the copyright claims of youtubers…
But yeah, intellectual property… complicated and benefiting corporations…
