Facebook today is introducing a new tool that will allow rights holders to protect and manage their photos across both Facebook and Instagram. With the newly launched “Rights Manager for Images,” Facebook is offering creators and publishers access to content matching technology similar to what it introduced in 2016 to combat stolen videos. The new feature, which is available in Facebook’s Creator Studio, will allow rights owners to assert control over their intellectual property across Facebook and Instagram, including when the image is embedded on an external website.
As with Facebook’s existing Rights Manager for video content, creators who want to assert their control over their images will have to provide Facebook with a copy of the images they want to protect as well as a CSV file with image metadata, as a first step. These are uploaded to a reference library that Rights Manager uses to locate matches across both Facebook and Instagram.
The creator doesn’t have to publicly post their images on Facebook or Instagram for this process to work.
When matching content is found on a Page or a profile, the rights holder can choose whether to simply monitor the content, block its use through a takedown request, or attribute credit to themselves via an ownership link. Creators can also choose whether or not they want their ownership to apply worldwide or only in certain geographic locations.
Newsweek had assumed the embed was legally permissible, given that Mashable recently won a similar copyright case in the recent past. But following the Newsweek case, Instagram clarified that its embedding feature didn’t include a license — if someone wanted to use the photo, they would need to ensure they had the proper license to do so. That bit of information came as something of a surprise and the case with Mashable was reopened as a result.
Until now, photographers had limited means of protecting their content across Facebook’s platforms. They could only take actions like enabling or disabling embedding entirely or making their account private, for example, to ensure their content wasn’t used and distributed without their permission. Of course, neither solution was ideal for a photographer trying to gain exposure and grow their career.
