Facebook now lets Pages make money from people who steal their videos

Video piracy is pretty rampant on Facebook. No, not in the sense that you can download the latest episode of your favorite show, but rather that videos are shared – and ad revenue gained – without proper attribution.

Facebook introduced the Rights Manager last year to help combat some of this, but creators would have to manually take action every time a video was matched, which would be a pain if your video gets pirated by multiple sources. Starting today, Facebook is letting creators automate actions so that they can prevent pirated content from spreading more quickly.

Creators now have four automated options:

The changes are definite step forward, and that second option is particularly interesting. Although Facebook isn’t clarifying how it’s determining what share of ad earnings the original content owner gets, it could still be a means for pirated videos to actually benefit the original content creators.

Moreover, rights owners can also set specific conditions for matched videos to meet for the above automated actions to happen.

For example, you can choose to only block a pirated video if it was posted by a Page – which is more likely to try to earn money off of it – but allow regular people to still share them. Another option lets you determine how much of your video needs to be copied for a match to be set – you might be okay with people using a snippet of your video, just not the whole thing. Other criteria include viewer locations, content type, and whether the video is shared publicly or privately.

These updates have begun rolling out and will be available to Pages using the Rights Manager around the world “in the coming weeks.”