Facebook Announces Its ContentID Attempt... Using Audible Magic

A few weeks ago we noted that it appeared that Facebook was building its own ContentID system to try to takedown videos copied from elsewhere... and voila, here it is. Facebook has now announced its new system, which is powered by AudibleMagic -- the same company that powers every other such system that is not Google's ContentID. Audible Magic is the "default." It's basically the "buying IBM" of content/copyright filtering. And it tends to be pretty bad. Facebook notes that its videos are already run through Audible Magic and that has basically done nothing. So they're "working with Audible Magic to enhance the way the system works."

We'll see what that means in practice, but I expect there will be plenty of false positives and complaints about people's perfectly legitimate videos getting taken down. But, that's what happens when you live in a world where people censor first and ask questions later. Even worse, it appears that some of the new tools will only be available to a special class of Facebook users:

To this end, we have been building new video matching technology that will be available to a subset of creators. This technology is tailored to our platform, and will allow these creators to identify matches of their videos on Facebook across Pages, profiles, groups, and geographies. Our matching tool will evaluate millions of video uploads quickly and accurately, and when matches are surfaced, publishers will be able to report them to us for removal.

We will soon begin testing the beta version of this matching technology with a small group of partners, including media companies, multi-channel networks and individual video creators.

It's clear why Facebook is doing this, but it seems that following Google down this path is a pretty weak solution, rather than building something better, that doesn't take a "censor first" approach to things.

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