Month: August 2022

Facebook is abetting intellectual-property thieves

Summary: Facebook abets a shadowy, intellectual-property thief. This thief has stolen rights to all of my videos since June 2022.

Details:

I broadcast my bike rides. I throw a GoPro HERO9 on my helmet and live-stream the ride to Facebook. The camera uses my phone’s hotspot for data.

I know, it’s silly. It’s a gambit to get my Facebook friends to accost me for a $2 bill. (Only ten $2 bills have been distributed in the past 26 months.)

As self-created recordings of my own bike rides, these videos are my original creations. Despite that, since late June, every video ends up with a copyright notice:

Partial still of my video with a bogus copyright notice on top.

When I click on the notice, I get an error:

When I try to get more info on these bogus copyright notices, I often get an error. Did Facebook design this into the system to protect thieves?

Refreshing that page, I finally get useful info:

Facebook says a thief’s property matches part of my video.

Huh, so Facebook alleges that a thief’s fake property matches part of my video. Let’s click See details and find out more:

Faecbook says a recording of my bike ride has someone else’s “music”? 🤣🤣🤣

Facebook says the 14.72 minute recording of my bike ride has 93.25 minutes of someone else’s audio? 🤣 So many problems with this.

What are these 72 territories where the claim is asserted?

72 countries where my audio is muted, due to someone using Facebook to steal my intellectual property.

Heres’ the 72 countries where Facebook allows a thief to steal my intellectual-property rights:

  1. Andorra
  2. Netherlands Antilles
  3. Angola
  4. Antarctica
  5. Aland Islands
  6. Azerbaijan
  7. Bahrain
  8. Burundi
  9. Benin
  10. Saint Barthelemy
  11. Brunei
  12. Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba
  13. Bhutan
  14. Bouvet Island
  15. Botswana
  16. Belarus
  17. Democratic Republic of the Congo
  18. Central African Republic
  19. Republic of the Congo
  20. Ivory Coast
  21. China
  22. Cuba
  23. Djibouti
  24. Western Sahara
  25. Eritrea
  26. Ethiopia
  27. Faroe Islands
  28. Gabon
  29. Greenland
  30. Gambia
  31. Equatorial Guinea
  32. Greece
  33. Guinea-Bissau
  34. Haiti
  35. Hungary
  36. British Indian Ocean Territory
  37. Iran
  38. Comoros
  39. North Korea
  40. Liberia
  41. Moldova
  42. Saint Martin
  43. Madagascar
  44. Marshall Islands
  45. Myanmar
  46. Mauritania
  47. Mauritius
  48. Maldives
  49. Mozambique
  50. New Caledonia
  51. Niger
  52. French Polynesia
  53. Papua New Guinea
  54. Saint Pierre and Miquelon
  55. Pitcairn
  56. Sudan
  57. Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha
  58. Slovenia
  59. Svalbard and Jan Mayen
  60. Sierra Leone
  61. Somalia
  62. South Sudan
  63. Sao Tome and Principe
  64. Syria
  65. Chad
  66. French Southern Territories
  67. Togo
  68. Timor-Leste
  69. East Timor
  70. United States Minor Outlying Islands
  71. British Virgin Islands
  72. Wallis and Futuna

This is a diverse group of countries: Second World, Third World, Axis of Evil, microstates, client states, failed states, and more. The only commonality I can fathom is they might not take intellectual property seriously, making it easy for thieves to use them as property-theft tools.

If I hit Continue (see two screenshots above), I pass through some perfunctory dialogs:

Perfunctory dialog explaining the basics of copyright.

Continuing, copyright tips that are inapplicable to someone who, like me, puts his original creation on Facebook:

Another perfunctory dialog giving irrelevant information to people who own the rights to their own media.

Finally, I get to do something:

Dialog allowing me to choose my next step: accept changes, submit dispute, or remove video.

Selecting Submit dispute then Continue brings more perfunctory dialogs:

Perfunctory dialog explaining what it means to dispute a copyright claim.

Now I can submit the dispute. I filled out the Submit dispute dialog:

Submit dispute dialog, filled out with relevant information.

Pressing Submit nearly always brings me to a final dialog, saying that my dispute was accepted and more information that is irrelevant to people uploading their original creation:

Dispute-accepted dialog.

Now the original support message says the audio was restored:

Facebook’s support message changed, now indicating that the audio is restored.

This is not an isolated occurrence. It has been happening since June 28. Here’s a screenshot of my Facebook support inbox:

Sampling of where Facebook aided a copyright thief many times.

This usually works but not always. I am incapable of shoving the thief off of one of my June videos. Every dispute attempt on that video ends in an error:

I always get an error after disputing a particular June video.

Is this an example of Facebook providing even more aid and comfort to intellectual-property thieves?

This experience concerns me on several levels:

  • Facebook allows thieves to use its system to steal rights to others’ intellectual property.
  • Facebook does not tell me which part of my original creation is triggering the thief’s false claim.
  • Facebook does not identify the thief to me.
  • Facebook’s interface appears to be designed to assist the thieves, using error messages to thwart intellectual-property owners.
  • At what point will Facebook suspend my account due to too many intellectual-property issues?

Here’s the same video, on YouTube (no fake copyright violations!):

The video where Facebook lets a thief steal my intellectual property. Also, this is more than 2 minutes longer than Facebook’s video. I haven’t analyzed why.

I challenge you to spot a copyright violation in it.

Technical notes that may be inconsequential:

  1. The video that Facebook sees is the broadcasted video, which is what the GoPro sends to Facebook through my phone’s hotspot. The above YouTube video is straight off the GoPro’s SD card. Having artifacts of running through a hotspot with variable speed, such as occasional skips or glitches, the broadcasted video will be lower quality than the SD-card-sourced YouTube video.
  2. My videos are usually much longer. The one that is the subject of this post is short because the camera turned itself off during my ride. That happens once or twice a month in hot weather, possibly due to overheating. The battery was at 77% when I restarted the camera.
  3. On occasion, when I ride by someone who has a speaker going, my video may pick up a brief recording of whatever music is playing. This is again unusual and is a brief recording further harmed by a lot of wind noise. These possible incidental recordings have never before triggered a copyright notice, so I don’t think they explain this issue. I once inadvertently included an incidental recording into another video–not bike-ride related–and I remember Facebook identifying the copyright holder, unlike what happens in this incident.