Facebook now allows ownership of images and issue takedown requests

Facebook is looking to give more control to the people over the images they own. According to an update to its right management platform, Facebook and Instagram both are working with some partners to give them the power to claim ownership over images and later moderate them if they show again on Facebook or Instagram. The feature is expected to roll out to the general public soon after the beta testing.

“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 the creator and publisher experience at Facebook, in an interview.

For claiming copyright, the image rights holder has to upload a CSV file to Facebook’s Rights Manager that contains all the image’s metadata. They can also specify the part where the copyright applies. The manager verifies the metadata and image and resolves the claim. If not they can counterclaim and appeal the decision over Facebook’s IP reporting forums.

This will help photographers whose hard work is often used by the clients sometimes without giving them due credit. Also, it will be interesting to see how meme pages react to it, as most of the meme pages use almost similar images with many edits applied over it.