Freebooting as Copyright Infringement

Today here, in our modern era world lies technology. According to computerhope.com, technology is an advanced set of tools used to make things easier and/or to resolve problems. An example of technology is computers, laptops, phone, tablet, TV, and many more. Another word for technology is ICT which stands for information and communications technology, this term mostly focuses for education as it works for giving information. Other than that, it is mostly has the same meaning as technology. Technology has many benefits such as increasing knowledge, improving health, entertainment, and many more that really improves generation today. Although, technology is used in so many ways it really depends on the user. Some ought to use technology in a negative (yet smart) way such as the black market, inappropriate content, addictive, narcissism, bad for your health and many more but there is one issue in the technology world that needs to be discussed.

Negative impacts in technology can be explained as illegal usage of technology. There are many illegal usage of technology such as online harassments, unwarranted surveillance, copyright infringement, cyber scam, cyber terrorism, cyber extortion, and cyber warfare. In online harassments there are online racism, cyber bullying, online predator, cyberstalking, and internet troll. Then in copyright infringement there is piracy, theft, and freebooting. One of the illegal usage if technology in ethical behaviors when using information communication and technology that I chose to learn more and get deep into it is freebooting.

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Freebooting is named by Brady Haran from Hello Internet and it is defined as a type of copyright infringement where it is the act of piracy or in simple terms downloading copyright content and re-uploading without the creator's permission. The reason for doing is to increase profit. Urban dictionary defines freebooting as “taking online media and re-hosting it on your website”. To evaluate, freebooting means the act of freebooters downloading copyright content and re-uploading without permission. This is similar to the act of theft because freebooters are basically stealing content that doesn’t belong to them.

One of the issues of freebooting happened at Facebook, which is an American social network company created in February 2004 by Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg), a technology entrepreneur. This application and website are a social media platform used to post pictures, videos, etc. Other than that, you can communicate with people anonymously or not. Anyways, when freebooters in Facebook took a video from YouTuber with 15 million followers, Casey Neistat, who uploaded a Halloween video with Jesse Wellens called ‘Aladdin in Real Life’ in October 31st 2015, which resulted with 10 million views. Adweek.com stated that it took weeks for them to complete this two-minute video. The two YouTubers spent a bunch of cash on costumes and used high-tech video shoot and shooting in the streets on Manhattan, New York. Neistat then took down 50 different posts on Facebook. He told adweek.com, “I spent roughly a week issuing takedowns on Facebook—a convoluted process, I crowdsourced the process of finding the freebooters because there is no way to search Facebook. In all, I took down well over 50 different posts— which was not nearly all of them. I simply gave up after a while. I anecdotally kept track of the view counts—over 20 million views on the videos I took down”. It is clear that he as a creator is mad over this issue and he is not the only one. According to Business Insider, the freebooting issue had gained more attention on this issue when Hank Green, a YouTuber and the co-founder of the Vidcon Convention, wrote about the problem in a website page called ‘Medium’.

According to adweek.com, many video creators complained to Facebook for not solving the issue of freebooters for freebooting, and the writer agrees with this movement, because creators put their heart and dedication to it and in result, their video gets stolen. It is indeed sad and not fair meanwhile freebooters gets all the views even larger than the original post. This is because Facebook cheated. How? Videos in Facebook usually come up as ads, so whether you watch or scroll through it, it is still considered viewed and so the numbers of viewers rise up to billions of views. Kurzgesagt (which in English means, ‘In a Nutshell’), an educational Youtuber stated in his video ‘How Facebook Is Stealing Billions of Views’ that about 725 of the 1000 most viewed videos in Facebook were mostly stolen from YouTube in 2015 totaling on 17 billion views. YouTube is a place where you can share videos founded on February 14, 2005, created by Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, and Chad Hurley who used to be former employees of PayPal. Anyhow, Neistat claimed that “Facebook has a team of the greatest technologists in the world, they can crank out entirely new products in a matter of weeks. But here we are, 8 billion views a day later, and there is nothing in place to protect content creators. Beyond a technological solution—something YouTube has had in place for years—there's a more pragmatic one: punish the freebooters”. How YouTube solves the freebooting issues does like this: when freebooters in YouTube are caught freebooting the third time, YouTube instantly deletes the channel. YouTube also has a system called ‘Content ID’, which it allows creators to block and track freebooters that steals their videos and took it without consent/permission. According to adweek.com, Alphabet-owned video platform said that it paid creators $1 dollar billion in 2014 all thanks to Content ID. So, what about Facebook? Why is Facebook still not doing anything?

It’s possibly because the freebooting issue is not Facebooks problem, and it is just a platform where freebooters can do anything and has no consequences, and in the writer’s opinion, Facebook is kind of like the egoistic dangerous (kind of) street where crimes have no consequences. It's like a platform where they have its partners and everything they want and see will belong to them. According to businessinsider.com, “Facebook has said it will start making it easier for creators to report abuse, but it's unclear how much progress the company has made. Meanwhile, creators are still very frustrated with the problem”. Smarter Every Day (an educational channel in YouTube) was one of the victims who got his tattoo video which got popular and got stolen by freebooters, and so he uploaded a video called ‘Facebook Freebooting’, where he discusses this freebooting topic distinctively detailed. He mentioned a process on taking down a freebooted video in Facebook (Kurzgesagt also mentioned the process in their video), where it goes like this: firstly, his subscribers or anyone can contact him about the freebooted video, then he fills out a very long (annoyingly to most people) form on Facebook, see as the views on his stolen content increase, and then finally Facebook takes down the video. It is clear in his video that around the freebooted video there are ads coming up everywhere, on the sides, the top, the bottom, and that's how Facebook makes their money, and he explained that when Smarter Every Day’s subscribers mentioned him on the freebooted the video, the stolen content this is when Facebook starts to put more ads before the stolen content gets taken down. Another statement that is totally logical is Derek Muller who is a YouTuber with a channel called ‘Veritasium’ and in his video called ‘The Problem with Facebook’, he said: “On YouTube, creators are paid for every view of their content, whereas on Facebook it’s the opposite. Creators actually have to pay for views”. Which make absolute sense. In this case, most freebooting issues mostly happens in Facebook than in other platforms.

Many creators mostly on YouTube have been putting all dedication and spent hours on making videos that deserve to be viewed faster than the ones who stole their content and gaining more views in days on Facebook. Facebook isn’t really doing that much, instead they just act like as if there is a problem and they sarcastically said: “Oh oops sorry, I can fix that in a jiffy, you just got to do few things first”. Smarter Every Day made a very good analogy story that goes like this: the rich man has tons of sheep (which is Facebook), meanwhile there are commoners who don't have a lot of sheep, but just only one sheep (the YouTube video) and they treat it like family (which they are creators). A traveler came (the freebooter) and worked with the rich man, they wanted to eat, but the rich man didn’t want to eat one of his sheep, so instead, the traveler insisted on eating the commoner's sheep, and so they did. The commoner was very sad and asked the rich man for a sheep, but the rich man ignored. This analogy totally explained the cases of freebooting on Facebook. Which brings to the conclusion that Facebook cheats and freebooting is not fair.

Freebooting is a selfish egoistic case where freebooters steal content from creators that they had to spend days and hours to perfectly finish the video and upload it to YouTube and getting billions of views in months or years, meanwhile freebooters in Facebook uploaded their content and gets billions of views in just days and they re-uploads it in Facebook to gain profit. Casey Nesitat, Veritasium, Smarter Every Day, Kurzgesagt, and many more channels have experienced this issue almost every day and they deserve so much better. So, how can we stop this freebooting issue as viewers and as a creator?

According to Smarter Every Day, as a viewer we can do these three steps he proposed which are: capture, comment, and contact. Firstly, you want to get solid evidence on the freebooted video, so you can screenshot or document it. Then comment on the stolen freebooted content and comment the link to the actual original content on the comment section of the freebooted video. In there, people can actually see that the video is stolen. Then contact the content creator about their stolen video and send them the link to it so that they can access it. That can help the creator take down their stolen videos. Kurzgesagt also mentioned another way and that is to share their video ‘How Facebook Is Stealing Billions of Views’ and Smarter Every Day’s Video ‘Facebook Freebooting’ and that way more subscribers and viewers can help original content creators take down freebooted videos and possibly freebooters as well. The writer has also proposed a solution. Content creators and viewers can sign up a petition to block all freebooters instantly and get a system similar to Content ID in Facebook. It goes like this, so when freebooters re-upload a content that isn't theirs, Facebook will have this system that is able to detect original videos. It could be like this, we should sign a petition that Content ID should be used for every channel and should be applied in Facebook, and so when freebooters re-upload in Facebook, they are not able to because with technological advancement tools we have today in this generation Facebook can be able to detect the original clip with Content ID. There is a thing called ‘copyright algorithm’ which is used to detect contents and match them with the original one created by creators and Facebook uses this algorithm to detect copyright soundtracks. With the copyright algorithm, not only Facebook can be able to detect copyright soundtracks, but also videos stolen from creators. Even though this solution isn’t thoroughly explained in detail, this solution may be possible.

It is safe to say that, freebooting, an illegal usage that is a part of copyright infringement of technology, is something that we all should defeat it and stand for what’s right. There are possibly many ways to punish freebooting and what we as viewers can do stop it. Freebooting is an issue that still happens until today and it needs to be stopped. As a writer, viewer, and creator, we should and want to live in a community where it’s equally fair and has rights.

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