This. Freebooting is a huge issue and Meta made it a big thing and profits from it.
A video or image goes viral. Creator has it on a platform where they can monetise or benefit from the views. Some chucklefugg at a content network like ladbible takes it, strips watermarks and logos, posts it on their own Facebook page. Facebook makes money off the adverts on that page.
Original creator is deprived of clicks, and likely revenue, dutifully completes a DMCA on their stolen content. Maybe a day or two later Meta takes it down. They don’t care, they still made money. Ladbible got a few thousand more subscribers to make impressions on their promoted posts, which nets then more money. The virality of the content has passed, the original creator doesn’t even get 1% of the same clicks and even less credit for their work.
Now multiply the number of content networks by about 500. Some of whom are fully automated with no human intervention.
This is not okay, and Meta should be held to task for creating a financial incentive for people to do this.
Sorry but what you’re describing is 100% not what this is about. There’s a case to be made for some sort of action being made by Facebook to stop freebooting (RIP HI), but it’s completely irrelevant to what’s going on here.
This is about links directly to news articles and the claim that Facebook and Google should have to pay for the right to link to a news organisation. News orgs couch this in language like saying Facebook “uses” their content, but this is a deliberate mischaracterisation.
Here’s a brilliant article about what it is and why it’s so dumb.
Freebooting of news article is distinctly what this is about. Content creators losing clicks, impressions, and ad revenue due to Metas methodology.
People can have a whinge “it’s news corp so fugg them” but just because something hurts something you don’t like doesn’t make it okay.
No, it’s not. Did you read this article? Did you read earlier articles around the time that the law this article is referencing was first being discussed & came into effect? Did you read Mike Masnick’s article linked in my earlier comment?
This is about Australia’s link tax, the News Media Bargaining Code. It’s got everything to do with requiring Facebook and Google to pay companies for sending them traffic, and nothing whatsoever to do with freebooting.
edit: for what it’s worth, this isn’t just News Corp. It was most heavily pushed in its earliest stages by News Corp and other right-wing media, but the Guardian, ABC, and SBS also supported this. That doesn’t make it right. It just serves to further prove how traditional media fundamentally misunderstands how technology works.
