Facebook Is Stealing People’s Work and Making Tons of Money Off Of It [Video]

There's a term called Freebooting. It's an old pirate term, apparently, but it has a new meaning in our social media world.

When you create a video, upload it to YouTube to get some views, and then some douche downloads the video and re-uploads it to Facebook as his own content. Then that douche is getting page views and likes, and Facebook is making tons of money off the ads on the video page.

That's Freebooting. And it's just like stealing music. It's wrong.

People work hard on their videos, and if there's any money that's owed for that content, it should go to the person who did the work! If you build a house, shouldn't you get paid for it? If you bake a wedding cake, shouldn't you get paid for it?

The guy in the video has his own analogy for the theft, about a sheep. Basically a rich man (Facebook) and a traveler (the person who downloads your video and re-uploads it to Facebook) are stealing your sheep and eating it, and you get nothing.

Just like illegally downloading music, you're taking something that someone has worked to create. Don't be a douche. It's easier to put a YouTube link into a post on Facebook than to download it and upload it. And Facebook should be less douchey and give those more views than just uploading to their video player.

Facebook rich dicks get richer, and the people that actually make the cool stuff you want to watch get ripped off.

If you see something like this happening, grab a screenshot of it, write a comment on the video with a link to the creator's YouTube video, and then let the creator know that they've been ripped off.

Not that Facebook makes it easy to get the theft taken down, and not that they have any intention of compensating the person who got ripped off, but at least you can help the creator try.

Stop stealing shit.