Facebook fails to stop users from sharing pirated movies

Several Facebook groups are sharing pirated Hollywood movies to hundred of thousands of users and the social media giant's automated software are unable to stop copyright infringements, the media reported.

Cambridge Analytica, a London-based data analytics firm, was accused of harvesting private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission.

San Francisco: Several Facebook groups are sharing pirated Hollywood movies to hundred of thousands of users and the social media giant's automated software are unable to stop copyright infringements, the media reported. According to the Business Insider, these Facebook groups make no attempt to conceal catalogs brimming with the latest blockbusters like "Ant Man and the Wasp" and "A Quiet Place." "These groups, some of which are years old, exist despite Facebook's army of human content moderators and automated software meant to detect copyright-infringing content, raising questions about the effectiveness of Facebook's content-policing systems," the report said on Sunday. Some of the group's titles are "Full HD English Movie" which has more than 134,000 members and "Free full movies 2018" that has 171,000 members. A Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying that "it wasn't the company's responsibility to take down such content unless asked to by the content's rights holders". In its battle against pirated content, Facebook last year acquired a US-based startup Source3 to help it weed out pirated videos and other content that users share without permission. "We're excited to work with the Source3 team and learn from the expertise they've built in intellectual property, trademarks and copyright. As always, we are focused on ensuring we serve our partners well," a Facebook spokesperson said at the time of the acquisition. Facebook has been struggling to crack down on pirated content for a long time. The company had in past announced "Rights Manager" technology to detect and remove video clips shared by people who do not have rights to the video. According to the recent Facebook transparency report, it took down 2.8 million pieces of content based on approximately 370,000 user copyright reports in the second half of 2017.