Meta’s looking to help brands better protect their intellectual property rights across its apps, which is a critical step in facilitating more commerce activity, and getting more brands on board with its broader shopping initiatives.
First off, Meta’s rolling out some improvements to its Brand Rights Protection Manager tool, which is accessible within its Business Manager app.
Originally launched in March last year (as its ‘Commerce & Ads IP Tool’), Brand Rights Protection Manager enables businesses to upload images of their licensed products, which Meta’s systems can then use as a reference point for detecting similar matches, in order to highlight potential usage violations in Page posts, Marketplace listings, etc.
Now, Meta’s adding new functionality to the tool, including automated takedowns for brands with a strong reporting history, improved alert recommendations based on expanded detection, and the ability for rights holders to upload a list of Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts that are authorized to use product images, to limit false positives.
Meta’s also expanded its search tools within Rights Protection Manager, enabling broader oversight of more types of content, while it’s also added the capacity to search using Facebook and Instagram URLs and IDs.
Brands will also now be able to specifically search and report Facebook Groups, Pages and profiles in the app, as well as Instagram accounts, and posts on both Facebook and Instagram.
There’s also a new element dedicated to combating brand impersonation:
“Brands can now report potentially infringing ads, Facebook Page and Instagram accounts just for impersonation, or for counterfeit, trademark or copyright infringement as well. This update will improve our ability to proactively detect and remove impersonating content.”
Finally, Meta’s also added a new insights dashboard for Brand Rights Protection, which will display the last 90 days of reports submitted and subsequent actions taken.
On another, more advanced front, Meta’s also launching a new Intellectual Property Reporting API, which will enable rights holders to more efficiently detect and report content that they believe violates their IP rights.
As explained by Meta:
“With the new IP Reporting API, rights holders can automate the reporting of content they believe infringes on their intellectual property rights. The tool integrates with our existing Graph API, which is the primary way for apps to read and write to the Facebook social graph. This integration allows authorized API users to more effectively fill out the same fields that exist in the IP reporting forms in a secure and streamlined way, bringing more efficiency to this process by allowing users to report content at scale.”
Given the development resources required to implement such, it’s a higher-end rights management option, which will provide bigger retailers with another way to better detect and address incidences of rights violation, which could help them better enforce their rights across the app.
These updates could also have implications for Facebook Marketplace, and resellers or sellers of counterfeits in the space. Thus far, Meta’s rights tools haven’t seemed to slow down trading in this respect, but improved automated detection could potentially change this, and assist in detection of such violations.
As noted, with Meta looking to push for more commercial activity in its apps, detecting scammers and counterfeits is a key element, in protecting users, combating fraud and aligning with retailer expectations.
These are some good updates, making use of Meta’s advancing visual identification tools, in more ways, which could be a big step towards improving its commerce listings.
You can learn more about Brand Rights Protection here, while you can apply for access to Brand Rights Protection Manager at this link.
