Instagram reposts may be outlawed soon

Facebook and Instagram Rights Manager for Images now allows creators to claim ownership over imagery. This means they're able to work with Instagram and/or Facebook to issue takedown notices to accounts that re-post imagery – both manually and automatically. This system is live now – the effects of this system's release should appear this week.

With Rights Manager, Page admins will work with applications for "content they've created and want to protect." This system will "find matching content on Facebook and Instagram" and notify the creator of said imagery.

Rights Manager is a system on Facebook that also works with content on Facebook's various owned companies – like Instagram. With Rights Manager, users are able to give Facebook information on their creations and allow Facebook to act as guardian for their rights across Facebook properties.

The Rights Manager system works alongisde the far smaller IP rights reporting system that's been in place on Facebook for a while. Both systems place Facebook in a position of power through information. Facebook will act as enforcement for your government-given rights to your intellectual property without involving the government, much like what's done on other major content hosting social networks like YouTube or marketplaces like Etsy or TeePublic.

With a system like this, Facebook is able to offer assistance to content creators, certainly. They're also able to use a system like this to place the legal burden of intellectual rights on the creators of the content. This way, if a content creator is upset that their images have been posted by 10,000 other Facebook/Instagram users, Facebook can point to their Rights Manager system, suggesting that the content creator should've used this tool if they wanted to keep their content from running wild.

The automatic search system outlined in this latest update from Facebook suggests that seeking out reposted content will become a lot easier in the very near future. Accounts on Facebook and Instagram that act as content aggregators could feel the effects of this tool's activation in the next few days.