Facebook acquires piracy prevention start-up Source3

Social networking giant Facebook has acquired technology start-up Source3 for an undisclosed fee to help flag unauthorised user-generated content on the site.

Source3 works in a similar way to the piracy identifier currently in use on YouTube - the Content ID system recognises videos that infringe on copyright or trademarks and flags this up to the content creator, whilst also preventing them from monetizing the offending video.

On their website, Source3's four founders issued a statement proudly proclaiming "We're joining Facebook!"

"We're excited to bring our IP, trademark and copyright expertise to the team at Facebook and serve their global community of two billion people who consume content, music, videos and other posts every day."

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"We thank everyone who helped us get to where we are today and we feel great about this next step in our journey - we can't wait to see what's next!"

According to the website, Source3's system is able to "recognise, organise and analyse branded intellectual property in user-generated content" to help preserve video copyrights and promote original content. 

Facebook's current piracy system revolves around its Rights Manager program, rolled out in April 2016, which allows publishing partners such as Machinima to combat "freebooting."

Hank Green - half of the YouTube channel Vlogbrothers - published a post in 2015 extensively detailing the problem. Hank found that 725 of the top 1,000 videos on Facebook in the first quarter of 2015 were freebooted - videos that are unauthorised copies of original content.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently continued his artificial intelligence war with Tesla's Elon Musk, calling Musk "irresponsible" for warning that AI could cause humans to become irrelevant.