Facebook is giving people more control over their intellectual property. The social network on Monday introduced Rights Manager for Images—a new tool that uses image matching technology to help creators and publishers protect their content.
According to The Verge, Facebook has partnered with a handful of undisclosed brands to lay claim over images and moderate where they appear across the platform and its subsidiaries, including on Instagram. National Geographic, for instance, could upload photos to Facebook’s Rights Manager, allowing it to monitor where those pictures are published—including on other brands’ Instagram pages. The magazine may then decide to let the images remain, issue a takedown, attribute credit via an ownership link, or block the post in certain territories.
(Photo via Facebook)
There is no word on who will gain early access, or when the function will be more broadly available. “We want to make sure that we understand the use case very, very well from that set of trusted partners before we expand it out,” Dave Axelgard, product manager of creator and publisher experience at Facebook, told The Verge. “As you can imagine, a tool like this is a pretty sensitive one and a pretty powerful one, and we want to make sure that we have guardrails in place to ensure that people are able to use it safely and properly.”
To get started, Page admins must apply online for access. Once accepted, simply add the content you want to guard and let Rights Manager handle the rest. The tool, part of Facebook’s Creator Studio platform, finds matching content on Facebook and Instagram. Users can also whitelist specific pages or profiles that have permission to share copyrighted images.
Facebook’s first iteration of Rights Manager was launched in 2016 and aimed at video makers. It attempts to streamline the process for reporting copyright infringement. For now, it’s unclear how the new photo feature will affect use cases like memes, or what effect it will have on Instagram, where people often share other creators’ images, tagging the presumed rights holder as credit.
