The anti-piracy firm, Source3, has announced that it will be joining Facebook. As part of the deal Facebook will acquire Source3’s IP, trademark and copyright expertise and use it to combat piracy on its platform.
Talking about the acquisition, A Facebook spokesperson said:
“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.”
Patrick Sullivan and Ben Cockerham, founders at Source3, aren’t stranger’s to selling content rights startups to giant tech companies. In 2011, they sold their previous company, RightsFlow, which focused on music IP to Google.
The acquisition shows that Facebook still doesn’t have intellectual property rights enforcement properly sorted out just yet, which is understandable for a website with a few billion users. Facebook will be hoping that Source3’s end-to-end platform for managing IP will be able stifle piracy on the network to accompany the policies that the company already has in place.
Source3’s statement ended with:
“We feel great about this next step in our journey, and we thank everyone who helped us get to where we are today – we couldn’t have gotten this far without immense support from our investor, advisors, employees and others. We can’t wait to see what’s next.”