One of the behind the scenes things I have to do at SCV is fight the massive video piracy of our content on social media. Last year SCV was finally approved for the META (Facebook and Instagram) content management system or “CMS”.
What does CMS do for us? Just like the Youtube CMS that we (SCV) have been part of since it was pretty much created by Google to help copyright holders fight the piracy on Youtube, the META CMS does the same across the META platforms. It digitally fingerprints your video and then searches for other videos that match the fingerprint to let us know about a possible video pirate.
In the last six months of using the META CMS platform, unlike the Youtube platform where we have a huge footprint, we needed to start from scratch on META. I did not think it would be that bad since the main video piracy revenue was from Google Adsense. Wow, I was wrong. Although we are still pushing our content to META to be reviewed, the number of Facebook and Instagram accounts that we have found just downright stealing our content is sickening.
How bad is the video piracy on Meta? While we only have a fraction of our content on Meta, we started out with our most popular videos and the results where pretty much terrifying. Just for one example, the Hurricane Irma video from Simon and Juston:
Just this one video, shows 7,388 total matches and of that, 4,243 still need to be removed. That means I have had to remove over 3,100 + pirated copies off of the Meta platform alone for this video and still have 4,200+ to take down.
Thank that is insane? Last week I found a law firm that was was using SCV footage in their advertising and you could clearly see that they ripped off the footage since our watermark was still in the video. I talked to our attorney and they are dealing with that one now.
So what, people are just using and sharing your content? Really? They are taking away views that should be coming to our crews and the SCV channels to promote our work. It is so bad that I recently had someone call me and threaten to sue me for taking down their Social Media pages because their pages had our stolen material and that they where “entitled” to use our footage under fair use when they where promoting a product and using our material for click bait. Yes I asked for their attorneys name and number just to speed up the process and was told to F#(( Off.
This policing of the video content is becoming a full time job on top of my normal job of working in the field and working on rights and clearances. I’m hoping to outsource it soon as I’m still trying to recover from the loss of work from last year dealing with the accident and spending most of my time trying to get my back, back into where it was before I was run off the road from the truck loosing its breaks.
Well, enough ranting, what else have I been up too? Well, not much, since I got out of the groove for the most part with shooting video last year due to the wreck and rehab, winter was kind of trying to get back on the horse so to speak. I did make it out for the several amazing Aurora Borealis shows this spring but timing for chasing severe has been way off or the weather is just not happening up here.
Here are some of the time lapse videos that I produced over the the past few Aurora events.
I’m kind of bummed that this version pretty much was ghosted on Youtube, compared to my fast edit the night of the solar storm. This edit has a lot more production work put into in post production.
And yes, I even was able to see them on the massive solar storm when I was in Iowa for the Iowa NWA conference this spring. I was able to drive back to the north and find a perfect spot in the middle of a wind farm and get a time lapse for a play on words “Solar Wind Farm” theme. I did notice that I did rush the production and was not on my A Game for this one due to lack of being out using my cameras much over the last year. I was able to correct the faults and make it work for the video above based on what I messed up on the video below.
Well it is late, Laura has one more day of school before summer break, time to get some rest people and back at it tomorrow. I’m hoping to be out chasing next week but not sure if the weather is going to cooperate. We shall see.