As part of its efforts to help combat infringement across its social networking platforms, Facebook has announced a new tool that it says will help users claim ownership of their images and issue takedown requests if needed. Called ‘Rights Manager for Images‘, the tool builds on the existing Rights Manager feature in Creator Studio and gives creators the ability to control how and where their images appear across Facebook and Instagram.
According to Facebook, the new version of Rights Manager would use “image matching technology to help creators and publishers protect and manage their image content at scale”. To access Rights Manager, page admins can submit an application to the company for content they’ve created and want to protect. “Rights Manager will find matching content on Facebook and Instagram. Settings can be adjusted to match things like ownership that should apply worldwide or only in certain locations”, the company said in an official blog post.
The new features expand on the original Right Manager tool that the company says helps people control when, how, and where their content is shared across Facebook and Instagram. According to Facebook, the tool not only helps creators who post their own unique content, but also publishing houses that don’t post to Facebook at all.
The new tool is yet to be available to all creators across the board, but the slow rollout is apparently to ensure efficacy and avoid misuse. In a communique to The Verge, Dave Axelgard, product manager of creator and publisher experience at Facebook, said: “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 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”.
