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Facebook and French anti-piracy association teams up to protect content

Facebook and French anti-piracy association teams up to protect content

Facebook and French anti-piracy association team up

Facebook and Association de Lutte Contre la Piraterie Audiovisuelle (ALPA), the French anti-piracy association, have teamed up to protect content on its platforms from copyright infringement, the tech giant announced on 26th July as reported by EURACTIV France.

Facebook has a video rights identification and management tool known as Rights Manager – which enables it to automatically identify and block content that infringes intellectual property laws on Facebook and Instagram platforms. 

As a part of this team up, Facebook will provide ALPA with the tool Rights Manager.

“Facebook’s commitment to working alongside the public authorities, the CNC and rights holders to fight piracy more effectively is a strong signal,” said Dominique Boutonnat, President of the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC), which oversees ALPA.

This commitment is “in favour of the protection of intellectual property” for a sector that “has suffered particularly since the start of the pandemic,” said ALPA president Nicolas Seydoux.

Due to the pandemic consumption of online cultural goods has increased. 89% of internet users agreed that they consumed content online. Compared to May 2019 it was 81% according to a report published in May by the French high authority for the dissemination of works and the protection of online rights (Hadopi).

This increase was also due to a rise in the number of illegal streaming sites during the pandemic, with a peak in March 2020 of 14.2 million consumers in France.

Facebook and the rights holders are doing this collaboration as lawmakers are discussing a bill on the regulation and protection of access to cultural works in the digital era which seeks to tackle piracy.

The bill provides for the creation of a new audiovisual and digital communication super-regulator, the Autorité de régulation de la communication audiovisuelle et numérique (ARCOM), which should be formed from the merger between and Hadoi and the High Council for audiovisual matters (CSA).

The EU 2019 Copyright Directive also provides stricter obligations on platforms in this area.

According to the directive, “online content-sharing service providers shall be liable for unauthorised acts of communication to the public, including making available to the public, of copyright-protected works” – which explains the acceleration of the implementation of filtering tools, notably by Facebook, since then.

“This tool is the result of a long-standing technological and human investment and we are proud that through this collaboration with the CNC and ALPA, our platforms allow artists to promote their works while guaranteeing the protection of copyright to which we are so attached,” said Edouard Braud, media partnerships director at Facebook France.

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