Is FB encouraging intellectual property theft?

New York: Facebook has been accused of "encouraging intellectual property theft" by YouTube star Hank Green in a blog post recently and he has stats to cite to corroborate his allegations. For instance, a report from ad agency Ogilvy and Tubular has found that over 70 per cent of Facebook's top-performing posts came from other sources like YouTube.

Venting out his resentment on the topic of "free-booting", Green, a YouTube creator who creates quirky videos for a number of channels, outlined why he believed Facebook's video practices were unethical, TechCrunch reported. Green said that if those users had embedded the YouTube videos on Facebook, this would not be an issue. Instead, these are videos that have been taken from other sites and uploaded to Facebook's native player, giving that Facebook page the credit rather than the rightful copyright holder.

Facebook's algorithm favours videos that are uploaded natively - a set-up that Green said encourages intellectual property theft. His argument centred on three points, namely that Facebook was routinely cheating, lying and stealing to maintain its upper hand in the online video streaming world, tactics that have led them to reportedly surpass YouTube and become the largest video-streaming service on the web.

"They lie." Autoplay ads can make stats on how many views your video got pretty inflated, Green asserted. With Facebook's definition of a "view" being confined to any user that allows a video to play for three seconds (YouTube's definition is generally 30 seconds), Green said video creators are very likely to see an inflated number of viewers who may actually have barely seen their clip.

"They steal." What Green said bothered him most was Facebook's lacklustre commitment to ensuring that copyrighted material was protected on the site. He pointed to a rather damning statistic that 725 of the top 1000 most popular videos of Q1 2015 were re-uploads of content from other sources.