Facebook pays millions to the music industry, so you can post videos in peace

[grimm]

As Facebook prepares to take on the streaming video services of the world, dealing with copyright infringing content is becoming a growing headache.

Primarily, Facebook appears to be under a great deal of pressure from record labels and music publishers to do something about the increasing incidence of copyright infringing content on the platform. Bloomberg reports that Facebook, which doesn’t want to impede the work of content creators, intends to pay “hundreds of millions of dollars” to these industry giants.

The report adds that Facebook is currently working on an algorithm to target and identify infringing content, but that development of such a tool could take as long as two years or more. Bloomberg’s sources tell them that Facebook is willing to pay stake holders rather than interfere with the growth of the platform.

Reportedly, Mark Zuckerberg stated in an earnings call that Facebook would continue investing in video as it sees video-sharing overtaking photo-sharing on the platform in the future.

The report points out that the music industry has seen a marked increase in sales and profitability, owing to the rise in streaming services and the licensing regimes that follow. Comparing Facebook’s deal to a Faustian bargain, Bloomberg thinks that the deal ensures that both sides benefit in some way rather than waste money fighting a trend that can’t be effectively dealt with yet.

Google, and its video-sharing platform YouTube, has long faced the ire of record labels and other stakeholders in the music industry. The company has responded by fine-tuning its algorithms to automatically identify and take down unlicensed content. It has also set up a system to ensure that DMCA requests and the like are responded to at the earliest.

While Facebook has allowed video sharing on its platforms since many years, it’s only in recent years that the company decided to increase focus on the medium and invest heavily in it.

The latest by-product of this investment is Watch, a new tab for discovering and sharing original video content on the platform.