Over the last several months, I've been reading about FaceBook's video feed and how it is quickly converting video users from other sites such as youtube, vevo, vimeo, etc. By FaceBook's reports, it is now averaging 4 billion daily views. Youtube's statistics also claim billions of daily views.
More and more complaints are being raised that FaceBook is cheating a bit to get these results. Last month, Business Insider ran an article about celebrity freebooters (i.e., a person who pirates a video and posts it to another social media). According to the article (and real life Facebookers), freebooting is pretty common. The basic problem is that content owners are able to monetize video content on Youtube, but when someone steals the video and posts it to Facebook the revenue stream is either lost or diverted.
Does this fact pattern ring a bell? Viacom v. Youtube anyone? If not, there is now an honorary wikipedia page to remind the world. If you don't remember, that lawsuit was over Spongebob Squarepants episodes being posted to Youtube, which resulted in the loss or diversion of revenue from Viacom. Technically, there were other shows being pirated, but I'm convinced that most of the issue was Spongebob. They've settled all that so you can waste the next hour here on Youtube:
Fast forward two years and Youtube is now grownup, polished, and respectable, but this immature Facebook thing is ripping off all the original Youtube videos. Well we don't have Google vs. Facebook yet, but one thing I am sure of is that you don't want to be the spark that sets off the case for that dispute.
So how can you share content from one site to another without infringing?
- Photos – Most sites will now allow you to display the photo by posting the url from the original site. That way the photo is not permanently copied.
- Videos – As with photos, most sites will also allow you to display video by posting a url rather than copying the video. This is how Spongepants got here.
- Audio – Is actually trickier. You can sometimes find a url of a player that you can link.
- Text – Just write your own.
As a general rule, take a few seconds before using content to figure out how to share it on your site without copying it. Also, your own content is always better.
Note that if you are using the content to sell something, these simple bullet points aren't quite sufficient.
Complete aside, but sharing and finding your own photos and videos just got easier with the new Google Photos; the new service makes it extremely easy to automatically backup and share your own photos. There is no charge for unlimited storage for most photos. It took me 7 full days to upload my 37,000 photos, but man is it worth it. I forgot I had about 36,900 of them! The most useful feature is the program's uncanny ability to search photos using image recognition.
Since we're sharing, please enjoy my favorite photo of an average day in the life of George Washington.
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