Facebook currently offers content creators a suite of copyright tools called “Rights Manager” that allows them to control how their music or video content is shared across Facebook and Instagram. Creators can choose to monitor the usage of their content, block it, or attribute the right credit via an ownership link on others’ posts. But so far, these rules could only be applied to music and videos, and not images. Today, Facebook has announced the launch of Rights Manager for Images that will rely on its in-house picture matching technology to help creators manage how their images are shared across Facebook and Instagram, and accordingly take the necessary action.

“Today, we are introducing Rights Manager for Images, a new version of Rights Manager that uses image matching technology to help creators and publishers protect and manage their image content at scale,” the company said in a blog post. Facebook says page admins will have to submit an application for their content that they want to protect and control the distribution of. Talking about rights management, the social media giant says that creators can also specify if the copyright controls should apply globally or only in certain regions. 

As per a report from The Verge, Facebook has already started to test its new image copyright management feature with a handful of creators and will eventually make this tool accessible to all users. “We want to make sure that we understand the use case very, very well from that set of trusted partners before we expand it out because, as you can imagine, a tool like this is a pretty sensitive one and a pretty powerful one, and we want to make sure that we have guardrails in place to ensure that people are able to use it safely and properly”, a Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying.