Facebook adds a new Rights Manager Tool, and will now let people claim ownership for images

Facebook has introduced a new Rights Manager tool to let people take more control over the images they own and how their images are shared across Facebook and Instagram. These new rights by the company are starting to work today with certain partners. The company didn’t give a timeline on when this tool will open more broadly.

Facebook previously introduced a similar Rights Manager tool in Facebook’s Creator Studio. But the new version of this Rights Manager which will be used for images will help creators and publishers to protect the rights to their images. And also they can manage how these images are shared across these platforms (Facebook and Instagram) at scale. The tool will use image-matching technology.

What you have to do to claim the copyright and how its going to work?

To claim the copyright, the image rights holder has to upload a CSV file to Facebook’s Rights Manager that contains all the metadata of the image. The owner can also specify where the copyright applies and can leave certain territories out. Once the manager verifies that the metadata and image match, it’ll then process that image and monitor where it shows up. If another person tries to claim ownership of the same image, Facebook will eventually yield it to whoever filed it first.

Theoretically, all this means that if a brand like Marvel uploaded its photos to Facebook’s Rights Manager, it could then monitor where they show up. From there, the owner could choose to let the images stay up, issue a takedown (which removes the infringing post entirely) or use a territorial block, meaning the post stays live but isn’t viewable in territories where the copyright applies.

“We want to make sure that we understand the use case very, very well from that set of trusted partners before we expand it out because,

as you can imagine, a tool like this is a pretty sensitive one and a pretty powerful one, and we want to make sure that

we have guardrails in place to ensure that people are able to use it safely and properly,”

Says Dave Axelgard, product manager of creator and publisher experience at Facebook, in a conversation to The Verge.

Facebook introduced the Rights Manager tool for images, so what will happen to memes now?

After all this, it is going to be interesting to watch what will happen with memes. Memes, of course, are edited constantly, so from now on, we have to see how much editing can be done to an image, like a meme, before it qualifies as a “match” with a rights holder’s image. On the same Axelgard says they’re starting with a small group to “learn more and figure out the proper way to address specific use cases like memes.”

Well, in the end, I will say, this new Rights Manager tool for images is a pretty good gift for content creators and photographers and Instagram itself. As to avoid having posts taken down, people/creators might end up uploading their own photography or image creation. And finally, Instagram can be the platform that it has been become earlier i.e a platform where only original images are shared.