12 Nov Prominent content creators accusing Facebook of facilitating stealing.

A Youtube video called ‘How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views’ created by information design studio Kurzgestagt has been sweeping the web since being uploaded to the studio’s Youtube channel on November 10th – the video which has since been shared by online influencers, personalities, content creators and tech leaders since then; has already amassed over one million views and counting.

People have been drawing attention to copyright infringement on Facebook for a while now, and although it’s obvious that Facebook should be accommodating and rewarding video content and it’s creators, it’s current model doesn’t support a fair reward system, there is no real partnership yet between the creators of content and the platform itself and in the meantime, freebooters get to line their pockets with ad revenue generated from views inspired by somebody else’s hard work and creative efforts. We see examples of copyright infringement everyday on Facebook, most of the site’s ‘viral’ videos are ones which haven’t been uploaded by the creators themselves, instead they have been taken from platforms such as Youtube or Vine by individuals who go on to share the material and benefit from the views.

Facebook will surely pay attention to this issue and rectify the situation, not only because inspiring a healthy rewarding relationship between the site and quality content creators will benefit everyone from a financial perspective but because this is a massive issue which influential content creators face everyday and it seems, rightly so, that they’ve had enough.