Illegal filesharing through social networks is a very hot potato for Russian site vKontakte, which has been fielding criticism (and lawsuits) from music rightsholders for some time. Facebook hasn’t really experienced the same problems: its users can’t upload and share music on its service like they can on vKontakte, while the more-private nature of Facebook means sharing links to piracy sites is harder to track for rightsholders. Still, it’s Facebook that has just been awarded a patent for “using social signals to identify unauthorised content on a social networking system”, trying to tap into the social network’s big data to spot infringing content and links as they are shared and discussed by its users. Examples mentioned in the patent include posting book chapters, TV show episodes or links to external piracy sites. “The social networking system may collect social signals about the content such as the diversity of the viewers of the content, the relationship between the viewers and another user or other entity that is featured or tagged in the content, and the relationship between the viewers and the user who posted the content,” claims the patent. “The social signals are then used to calculate a series of aggregated metrics to generate a prediction for whether the content is an unauthorized use of the social networking system.”
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…