Police playing music while being filmed, seemingly to trigger copyright filters
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The DMCA and similar laws provide protection to the platform if they act quickly on takedown notices, but the law needs to be updated to provide penalties for the reporter for inappropriate takedowns.
This would allow Google/Facebook/et al to change their tools from automatic takedown to reporting the violation to the copyright holder, and then it is up to the copyright holder to file a claim. If perhaps the copyright holder makes too many erroneous claims, they lose their copyright altogether.
Let the platforms be neutral, put the liability on the copyright violators and copyright holders equally, so both have a reason to act fairly.
1. All DMCA notices must contain an analysis of fair use and explain why the content does not meet fair use.
2. Anyone who has received an improper notice (including an analysis of fair use that would not survive summary judgement) can countersue (or sue, if the copyright owner declines to bring suit after a counter-notice) for at least $1000 in statutory damages.
3. Any non-DMCA system that can take down user-generated material for alleged copyright violations must give users the same rights as the DMCA: the (new) mandatory analysis of fair use and the right to counter-notice (and host the content until it is determined in court). These rights cannot be waived by contract.
There are some serious issues with DMCA abuse but I think that it'd be better to address the issues of abuse with a regulatory body that's specifically empowered to go after bad actors.
The core problem here is that the internet moves really really fast and is really really worthless so trying to protect owned content on it is extremely difficult.
As a musician I have a hard time imagining a case where an honest DMCA takedown could be reversed by someone listening to the same music I am and identifying something else.
So Disney would be paying 93% of their Mickey Mouse revenue in taxes this year. Have the IRS enforce it, where they can audit the books.
Or they can just give up the copyright.
This would also solve the abandoned works problem. Every copyright would have to have an annual filing to maintain it, with the owner listed publicly. No filing? Copyright invalid, public domain.
And lastly, it would basically put a cap of 99 years, because even if you're making a trillion dollars a year from your copyright, it wouldn't make sense to pay 100% or more of your revenue.
For example, the first 5 years would be $100, the next 5 would be $200 ... by year 100 you're paying $52.5 million to extend your copyright by another 5 years.
You could even set up a scheme where you can pre-pay your copyright dues to a set period. Want 30 years w/o having to renew, put down $5,600 up front and it's good. Want to test the waters on something and lock in for 5? Send in $100 and let it go abandoned 5 years later if things don't pan out.
And it seems very difficult to calculate a percentage among mixed works.
"Steamboat Willie" is copyrighted, but I don't know if Disney actually makes any money off of it at all (even if there were a good way to account that). What Disney wants is for you to not be using it.
You might have a better case for, say, Cinderella, a film that they actually do make some money off of. Again, I'm not sure how they'd account for it -- it's available on streaming, and how much of that revenue is due to Cinderella?
Even if you were taking a percentage of their DVD sales, I suspect they'd be happy to pay it. As with Steamboat Willie, their intention is for you not to be using it more than their actual use.
> No filing? Copyright invalid, public domain.
This would kill copyright entirely. 99.999% of copyright-eligible works are commercially worthless and always will be. Even if registration were free, it would not be worth the time to do it in most cases. However, we want to protect all copyrightable works so that in the 0.001% case, the right person or people can capitalize on the value of their work. For example, if you wrote a story years ago and would like to make it into a novel, it would be unfair if anyone could copy your story because you didn't register your copyright.
However the way Youtube handles dmca and copyright claims means that if you are a smaller musician, a big corporation can just steal your music and profit off it. Good luck if you don't live in the US and don't have the money to take back what is yours. From that point you can basically just hope that you make the news so that a human at Google looks into the mess they created for once.
Just leaving a reminder of how infuriation Youtube copyright handling can become even for larger channels: Back in 2018 TheFatRat got his music claimed by some randoms and Youtube just gave it to them on a silver platter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4AeoAWGJBw . TheFatRat was a popular youtuber even back then, and even for him the process was hard. Now imagine how that situation would have played out for the average musician.
When people talk about "protecting the musicians" they typically only mean the richest musicians, the top few % and the largest record labels. No one cares about regular musicians.
The same logic also means that dmca claims can be easily weaponized by any entity as long as they choose their targets strategically (or own enough money to tank the situation in which a target fights back, but even then that can create more damage for the target).
While your points are valid I think the real problem is that the Police is trying not to be accountable and to escape its responsibilities.
The problem with the adversely approach is that it gets behaviour like this. You back someone into the corner and how do you think they'll react, defensive and insular or open to mutual understanding and growth.
I'm not a US citizen but I do feel there is something generally wrong with the policing there and a need for universal improvement that aligns the police closer to the citizens.
So being live streamed without consent is first and foremost a citizen tool to overwatch the police's action and honestly you don't have anything else allowing to do that in real-time. Policemen are not backed in a corner when filmed, they are acting in broad light. It may seems adversely but police proved since decades that they always took the violent path when interacting with people one way or the other and giving policeman the power to take it down on people profiled or randomly is a repeated proof. If great powers comes with great responsibilities, an uniform does not seem to come with a way to enforce the later.
you simply can't do it any other way.
A public servant or officer of the public, paid for by public funds, must not have any expectation of privacy while performing her or his job.
Every time they walk up to anyone, or a car, they could be shot and die. This is insane and I don't think many people appreciate this. It completely changes the dynamic of the relationship between citizens and police.
Not to mention, US police aren't trained to deal with this stress. Which is an extra problem.
I loved the interview Jocko Willink did with Joe Rogan shortly after the George Floyd killing. The answer isn't defunding the police. Its more funding. So they can spend 20% of their time training, like the military. So they can get accustomed to high stress situations and DEescalation. These skills need to be learned. And they're not.
Cry me a river. Police, when using the powers that the people gave them, should not have any problem being held accountable for what they are doing.
There's a difference between an individual (and that may also be an officer off-duty) being live streamed without consent or an actor acting on behalf of the government like a cop or a politician being live streamed.
In fact, their signatures/actions should be invalid unless properly announced and distributed all their voters.
Ideally no one, including your boss, can review body cam footage without a good reason (checking to see if the officer is slacking is NOT a good reason). I can't imagine that being practical though (it would be ignored).
Body cams don't seem like the right solution. Society can come up with better ideas. Improving training, increase penalties when wrong-doing is proven, etc.
...right?
1. Copyright holder files a claim.
2. Platform takes down content, and notifies the poster of the content.
3. If poster thinks the claim is incorrect, poster notifies the platform.
4. Platform restores the content, and notifies the copyright owner.
5. If the copyright owner wants the content taken down again, they have to sue the poster.
If the copyright owner must swear that they believe their claim is true. If they intentionally make a false claim it is perjury.
All that's really missing is it sounds like you would penalize the copyright owner for being wrong about fair use regardless of whether they were wrong because they honestly thought it was not fair use or they were wrong because they knew it was fair use but lied about it.
Fair use is subjective and tricky enough that it is not at all uncommon for both side to go into a case expecting for the court to go their way.
Some major platforms don't follow the above, because they have decided to handle copyright using their own procedures instead of following the DMCA procedures.
Furthermore, YouTube et al don't follow the DMCA. Their process is outside the DMCA, and starts with automated enforcement on behalf of the copyright holder, with no recourse for the potential violator.
The DMCA already has a system that is much fairer to the average creator in the form of safe harbor provisions. YouTube doesn't like the DMCA process because it's expensive to handle and process individual claims, compared to letting their big partners just sling bogus claims across the entire site.
They'd prefer to be on the side of rightsholders over creators, simply because it's cheaper.
It's unclear to me why it would be expensive. The hosting provider just has to check that a take down request includes all the statutorily required elements.
That should be pretty easy--they don't have to check that the claims are right. They just have to check that the claimant identified the infringed works, the infringing activity, and where it took place; check that contact information was provided; check that the claimant includes a statement they they have a good faith belief that this is infringement; and check that they have a statement that the information is accurate and they are authorized to make claims on behalf of the copyright owner.
Similar when responding to a counterclaim.
This seems like something that could be cheaply outsourced to some cheap forest digital sweatshop to handle.
However unchecked use of police force and lack of effective oversight are also serious problems. These are a large part of what has led to the situation today, where it is necessary to film routine police encounters.
And why would police actively try to sabotage a video recording of themself?
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide" cuts both ways.
There are exceptions to this. See Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 801 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2015).
"Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 801 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2015), is a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, affirming the ruling in 2008 of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, holding that copyright holders must consider fair use in good faith before issuing a takedown notice for content posted on the Internet."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenz_v._Universal_Music_Corp.
"In ... Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., decided by the Ninth Circuit on September 14, 2015, a mother's 29-second home video of her two toddlers dancing to Prince's 1984 song "Let's Go Crazy" has made important new law with respect to "takedown notices" under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), holding that copyright holders must consider fair use before sending a takedown notification. This decision increases the potential liability for copyright holders seeking to enforce their rights through the DMCA and should serve as a warning to ensure fair use is considered before sending a takedown notice."
https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2015/09/ninth-circuit-s...
One simple solution is that every time a bad takedown notice is successfully challenged, the copyright holder has a 1 in 10,000 chance of losing their copyright.
So, DMCA takedown is successfully challenged. Now we roll two 100-sided dice. If they come up snake eyes, the IP is now in public domain forever. That would make copyright holders only challenge content that they are confident is in clear violation. Disney's not going to give some copyright troll the contract to shotgun DMCA notices across YouTube, if it means a serious risk of losing the rights to Frozen.
> This would allow Google/Facebook/et al to change their tools from automatic takedown to reporting the violation to the copyright holder,
Is there anything stopping them from doing that now? I was under the impression that the current system was something google chose, not something forced on them by law. Like they have to respond to take down notices, but the content-id thing was something they chose themselves.
It's a win-win for Google and the copyright holders, but a loss for everyone else, who loses the (very limited) protection provided by the DMCA process.
If they were indemnified by law and even worse liable for penalties if they keep the current system, then they would quickly change it.
Big no to this, as that can and would be abused by scavengers, but the rest is sane and broadly agreed to be the way.
What tou want instead is fines by revenue / income.
How would scavengers abuse this?
For the police? They may be in violation of copyright law for playing the music without a Public Performance License. I don't see an argument for fair use on their part.
I'd imagine you could make a mint baiting the RIAA if you were ok with being as sleazy as them
Copyright laws and DMCA take downs are an issue, yes, but not here. If police recordings are being taken down because the cops are playing music then make it known far and wide which cops are doing it and get their local district attorney involved.
Hell we likely are going to get a few Qualified Immunity rulings on this protecting both the cops and other officials but the only issue we should concentrate on is bad cops doing whatever they please and purposefully making society worse
Merely being aghast at extrajudicial killings doesn’t stop them.
The Rodney King beating was filmed 30 years ago, so evidently we need more than just documenting it. We need to elect people who will actually defund the police, because reform clearly doesn't work.
Where is the evidece of this?
Documenting deadly encounters with police probably is a good thing.
But 99.99% of encounters with police are not that, I'm not sure filming every encounter is necessarily productive, you'll have to provide some evidence.
In my country, we don't film the police, there is not a lot of police violence, and of course, there is not a lot of gun crime.
In US about 40% of households or 22% of individuals own guns. More likely among those doing bad things, so you can say 30% of the people cops are dealing with own guns. There's a very high chance that someone they pull over, has a gun.
Other complex issues aside, consider if you could magically take away those 270M guns, what would the outcome be? And how would policing change? How would the posture of public servants in those situations change?
As for filming, I'd rather see strong rules about their bodycam uses, ie when it has to be on, off etc.. Like for example, they have to have it on for pullovers, or if they are in any kind of complex interaction.
I'll hold my breath while the individual police officers are pursued for these egregious copyright violations with as much vigour as those receiving take-down notices.
https://www.bmi.com/faq/entry/what_is_a_public_performance_o...
Similar to this[1].
YouTube gets many takedown requests to remove videos that copyright owners claim are infringing under copyright law. Sometimes these requests target videos that seem like clear examples of fair use. Courts have decided that copyright owners must consider fair use before they send a copyright takedown notice. Because of this, we often ask copyright owners to confirm they’ve done this analysis.
[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9783148?hl=en#zipp...
It would certainly not be good if we set a legal precedent that it's illegal to listen to music at any volume that a nearby person could hear or record.
To perform or display a work “publicly” means—
(1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered; or
(2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.I don't think many folks are going to YouTube to listen to music from a filmed phone.
"reducing the ability of the record company from gaining revenues"
>"We do not recklessly expect the police to give a summons to a Con Ed worker having a beer with his lunch". [0]
Yet today, if you have a beer in the park at lunch you will get ticketed, or at least a warning. The lesson? Do not rely on discretion and restraint to make up for an overly expansive letter-of-the-law.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_laws_of_New_York#cite_...
Hah, it'll be like the joke of bringing a predator to get rid of some insects in your home, and a predator to get rid of the first predator, and ending up with an apex predator...
no, unlicensed public performance is itself a breach of copyright.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/music-public-performance-r...
It's completely unambiguous.
Playing music to yourself is 100% legal.
Making videos of content of said music, and posting to YouTube, is not.
"I'll hold my breath while the individual police officers are pursued for these egregious copyright violations"
So given that it's the person filming that is breaking the law, and not the cop, I'll assume you'd point the same disdain for those individuals egregious breaking the law?
At the same time, deliberately playing music while conducting an activity that entails conversational interchange is clearly a ploy to prevent that which I understand to be (perhaps incorrectly) a lawful activity in the US.
https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-police-officers-a...
> A public performance is one that occurs either in a public place or any place where people gather (other than a small circle of a family or its social acquaintances).
https://www.ascap.com/help/ascap-licensing
> Generally speaking, public performances are very broadly interpreted under the law and are defined as performing “at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered.” This has been interpreted to mean that most performances at so-called private clubs and fraternal organizations are “public” under the copyright law.
https://www.bbb.org/council/for-businesses/toolkits/bbb-broc...
It's a place open to the public, so it is a public performance.
No, that's not a rational inference.
Care to take a moment and search the case law for this?
Given that millions of people play music in public every day, can you find even a single instance of case law that supports the absurd claims in this thread?
No?
Nobody ever charged for listening to music themselves?
This comment really helps to highlight how badly HN melts down in the face of facts they don't like.
By your argument, playing music at the beach or at the office, even to yourself is a against the law.
It's a false argument based on a magical reading of the code.
It is 100% legal for someone to play music for themselves, full stop.
This is not one of those issues that IP lawyers just don't pursue because it's not worth it, rather, they don't pursue it because they cannot.
Just because you are 'in public' does not mean you are giving a public performance. Otherwise every radio everywhere would be banned, or come with a warning label.
If you are playing music in your store, for customers, you may be breaking IP law.
If you play it for a large number of employees, maybe.
If you play it as part of a performance intended for the public and have a public audience, then probably.
And of course, if you film someone listening to music - real or rehearsed (like a cop) - and put it up on YouTube you're probably breaking copyright. Maybe.
Yes, playing music at the office is against the law.[0] It's just difficult and extremely impractical to enforce. UK law is similar, and as others have attested on this post, rightsholders are much more aggressive in enforcing them there - if it's not absurd that that would constitute a public performance in the UK, why is it absurd that it wouldn't constitute a public performance in the US, when the law is written the same way?
> It is 100% legal for someone to play music for themselves, full stop.
If you're playing music on a speaker in a public place (and the law defines what a public place is), then you're not playing music for yourself, it's a public performance.
> Otherwise every radio everywhere would be banned, or come with a warning label.
There are specific exceptions in the law that cover playing the radio in an establishment (17 U.S. Code § 110(5)(B)). Yes, the limitations on public performance would apply that broadly if there were not a specific provision in the law carving out an exception for these, and even then they're required to follow certain provisions.
> And of course, if you film someone listening to music - real or rehearsed (like a cop) - and put it up on YouTube you're probably breaking copyright. Maybe.
There is no copyright infringement here, this is covered by fair use. If this went to court, a judge would determine the video was published for the purposes of commentary/criticism of government officials, among other fair use factors. Otherwise government officials could come to an arrangement with rightsholders and always play licensed music at all times and deny these licenses to critics in order to prevent any critical videos from ever being published, which is obviously just circumventing the First Amendment.
Even if Instagram had taken it down, it wouldn't mean it wouldn't be fair use as platforms are notoriously conservative with respect to these matters, but the fact is that Instagram hasn't even taken this video down for copyright infringement. So your theory about this being copyright infringement is moot.
[0]: https://www.bmi.com/news/entry/20030509_Playing_Music_in_Wor...
Otherwise, every employee in bars and restaurants could "play music to themselves", without paying anything and without infringing copyrights ?
The arguments being made here are infantile, and embarrassing.
Because people 'hate cops' (shameful), they use magical thinking to twist even common sense upside down.
The person making a video public is the person making something public, not the cop.
Remember when Youtube removed a video of someone in their garden with the rationale that the sounds of birds chirping infringed on some company's copyright [1]? And then they upheld the removal even following manual review, so the tired refrain that it was just an automated bot was not even applicable.
If you read carefully, you will see they refer in the cited case to the Content Id system. In that case Google allows the claimants to verify that it is indeed their content and takes their word for it with no repercussions.
If the company above had made a false DMCA claim they would be in rough water, as DMCA provides the tooling for damages etc and "countersueing."
Essentially Google found a way to produce something worse than DMCA in all aspects besides automation and angering their product (that is the users and content creators).
Indeed, many businesses large and small give free goods and services to the police for exactly this reason.
In UK playing commercial radio at work is a breach of copyright if anyone else can hear. Police departments were notably targeted by copyright associations.
They similarly targeted people like solo garage mechanics: they work alone with commercial radio playing in their private workshop ... but if a customer comes up then they're technically breaching public broadcast provisions. So, you find solo workers and send a copyright association enforcer to see them ... if they can hear a radio (or other music, even on a properly licensed TV) from a publicly accessible area then they can successfully sue!
I used to work in a shop, the copyright people would ring, there'd be 10s of silence on the line presumably as they try and catch us listening to music. We used CC0 and other similar music but the repeated suggestions 'you have to have a license to play any music' made us fear being sued, so we stopped.
[1]https://m.dpreview.com/news/0190365065/apple-patents-system-...
It should not be praised.
Perhaps they should be playing April 29th 1992 by the same band, or does their cognitive dissonance actually have a limit?
Not every comment has to be a multi page long essay.
Instead, merely telling people that something exists is useful, so people can search for it later.
If you really care so much, then you should feel free to find then yourself.
I think it's perfectly acceptable to collect your own evidence when it comes to interactions with the police or anything that may end up in a court of law.
Which is why it's kinda weird that where I live, you can't use security camera footage from inside your own house if you haven't clearly warned about security cameras being present. Even burglars get privacy protection, apparently.
A next step could be for the artist to sue the police department for unliceased music. Create a story and it might become a national story.
On a more general note, respect for the law requires respectable laws. Short sighted laws meant to benefit some special interests implemented without clear and effective safeguards are a would-be tyrant's wet dream. How fortunate we are that these officers blew their load trying to shut down some random guy's interview rather than saving this hack for a special occasion like suppressing a major protest or worse. Imagine the danger of someone more ambitious manipulating the system in analogous ways but on a much larger scale. Who knows what sorts of law-hacks the next wannabe despot is already sitting on? Constant vigilance is the only defense.
Unfortunately, enforcing this will probably only happen if someone with standing files a lawsuit. I doubt many music labels that hold the relevant copyrights are interested in suing the cops.
[1] damages normally start much lower, but the performance of the copyright protected work is patently willful
I wonder how the members of Sublime feel about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_29,_1992_(Miami)
TLDR : Sublime is about as "anti-cop" as you can get.
The person making the video 'without critique or educational purpose' is probably in violation, hence the take down.
A label would never sue the cops first and foremost because they have no standing.
For example, if a romcom rips off some music I created can I sue Ben Affleck because he appeared in it? I doubt it. I especially doubt it if he didn't want to be in the film.
And for that purpose, it doesn't matter whether it was a public performance or not. I can make a video of me sitting in a chair with a copyrighted song playing in the background, and it will get taken down. Hardly what I would call a "public performance".
IANAL so I can't claim the top answers are correct but it was an interesting discussion so take away what you will.
Edit: If the police played a song that they had the rights to it would mean that they themselves could issue the takedown requests, but it means the uploader could file a counter-notice and the rightsholder needs to a) Show Google they filed a lawsuit to defend their copyright within 10 days, and b) Prove that the infringement is not fair use
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24372036
Should have seen who would be the main benefactors of this trick though...
Musicians would be paid fairly and culture would flourish from not being confined by private entities that buy up the rights to how people express themselves.
Redistributing money would be terrible: the government would have another token to use to raise taxes (on which they can surely pocket a % for managing the work - free of market interference, so with zero competition or attention to waste) and the artist would have less of an incentive to make truly great pieces.
That said, we don't need copyright laws or any other law which facilitate rich producers to get money or censor people. If we didn't have an expensive government upholding copyright laws, producers could just sell music with a non-redistribute contract. If someone breaks that contract they can go to a court and get a monetary compensation. If they're selling so many copies that they can't keep track of all the people sharing their music, consider it a market fee on excessive profits.
The problem in our society is that rich producers can corrupt the government (and media / education: how many people consider copyright to be fair?) and get them to pass laws which give them extra power.
We already have enough production and even unemployment! We have more than enough spare labor capacity to let people try their hand at music more freely.
In any case, I know several musicians and they essentially get repeatedly spit on by society, work for peanuts, and never give up on their mission even after sometimes becoming near suicidal. The current system is inhumane and starves us of non-commercial art.
I imagine that the way the system would work would be some kind of minimum disbursement for everyone, a higher level arts disbursment for people that are recognized to be working or emeritus musicians by their peers, and public contracts worth more money for particular projects.
The ceiling of financial success might be lower, but many fewer musicians would be living on ramen for decades or speculating on GameStop out of frustration. The idea is create a system that is explicitly not winner-takes-all.
FWIW, slightly odd to read 'dole' here, it's just a slang term for unemployment benefits/'jobseekers allowance'/PC term du jour.
It's not some pedestal-worthy since-scrapped UBI or whatever.
It's partly just fashion I suppose - for whatever reason (self-reinforced, I suppose) there was more 'pride' in it, that I can't really imagine in modern lyrics, but we do have 'drill' etc. proudly rapping about illegal activities and turf wars, which is similar I suppose, in the sense that an outsider thinks 'why is that something to sing about, keep it to yourself, surely'.
I think it would be better to just have universal basic income for everyone (definitely not something restricted to music or even "art") and then have people find their own way if they want more on top of that. Highly regarded musicians can earn money without copyright just like anyone else: concerts, contract work, etc - just like everyone else.
Or does the art have to pass some kind of appeal test in this scenario.
The idea being that society is richer for having cultivated talents and art regardless of whether a random person on the street is willing to pay for it.
For your drawing, I guess it would depend on if you met the criteria of being "a practicing artist" by a rubric devised by artists. There might be lower or moderate levels on that scale that would e.g. cover supplies for talent development or initial forays into full-time practice.
Like honestly this idea is so amazingly terrible and full of an infinite number of holes I'm surprised anyone is arguing for it.
There are so many solutions for industry like listening devices for venues that figure out what was played so that licensing can be processed.
I see this yet as another failure of the RIAA to get a leg up and provide a win-win solution. Instead these idiots are stuck in their old thinking until it's too late and someone else will once again "steal" a huge part of their profit. Apple is one that took such a chunk from them because they sat around.
Part of that negotiation is about leverage and bundling (you can buy our hits but not without also buying all the crap) and gives a whole industry of middlemen jobs. A-la-cart licensing would be a disaster for some of the goons in RIAA.
Worked for some people trying to get that kind of thing going with the record companies but they were beyond ambivalent about it. (As well they might be given that money rolls in without much effort on their part.)
Because Covid, she and her team (yep, those exist!) are practicing remotely using various streaming software.
Last training session this saturday, suddenly the teacher stopped everything, and said they would need to change what music they are practicing, after lots of dancers with confused faces, she then said: "Well, Facebook just threatened banning my account permanently if I keep streaming this music, because copyright violation."
I think the DCMA people may want to change their tune on this (pun intended).
Playing music among a small group even if they are disparate, is probably actually legal, or it should be.
Repelling livestreamers with licensed music, like they are vampires and it works!
Cops are about to start wearing JBL Clip 3’s on their utility belt.
The police are supposed to defend the law. When you see a uniformed officer, on duty, behind the desk AND on camera, use what he KNOWS to be a cheap abuse of the intent of one law in order to break some other law, you should be really sad about where we've landed as a country.
Shouldn't this officer be helping the man behind the camera?
Cops in motion picture land use motion picture law to thwart motion picturers.
I think there is enough consensus to see that this should be fixed.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxb94/is-this-beverly-hills...
But I believe YouTube stores some kind of digest related to the audio they identify, not the audio itself.
Then again, that audio is available for many pieces that happen to be present in other videos on YouTube, which ContentID would automatically identify.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
The same thing will happen in places that are trying to restrict filming of children without their parents consent. Cops will find a kid, make sure they're in frame, and use that as their pretext.
All anti-filming laws are subject to abuse by police. Police and cameras (or more broadly, executive power and documentary vision) have a very special relationship in society, and if the latter isn't given absolute latitude, the former will take the offered inch and subsume the right entirely.
Such a product would be interesting for every Youtuber, not just broadcasters. I've seen them literally flee scenes in travel videos because of some music in the background.
I take offense to that.
Also, I fully expected the officer to be playing Inner Circle's "Bad Boys" on a loop.
The same would be more difficult with video, but could be done eventually.:
This approach would require a great amount of initial investment. It would have to be designed to deal with frequency shifted audio as well.
There is no "the" popular opinion.
2. just mute the audio and post the video with "Audio available upon request" caption.
Isn't this Fair use? :)
There is also Krisp.ai, a similar product for noise canceling; they have written up an overview of the difficulties involved on the NVIDIA Developer Blog, interestingly enough (it seems they were called 2hz.ai back then):
- https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/nvidia-rtx-voice...
- https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-real-time-noise-sup...
There is a technical barrier to freedom these days. And if you can't overcome it, the societal equivalent to the laws of physics mean that you don't DESERVE freedom.
and yet you are here, posting on a non-free (as in speech) corporate service where your views might be censored.
you're not helping! why is that, leon?
> if you can't overcome it, the societal equivalent to the laws of physics mean that you don't DESERVE freedom
big yikes, capital-L libertarian here. hey guys just bootstrap your way into not being oppressed by police!
I guess the Libertarian answer here is to start a competing police force that could prevent the police from oppressing you by force of arms? Let me know when you get around to it, I'll file the FBI tip, they aren't too keen on that stuff after last month.
It's a similar problem (albeit much less extreme) to what's happening right now in Myanmar with the military. It's so difficult to defuse because the military and the civilians there have such an adversarial relationship due to the long years of dictatorship.
The solution in both cases is to reincorporate the warrior subculture (police or military) into civilian life. I just don't know how you achieve that.
I have friends that believe that the only solution is starting a war just to provide the cultural outlet. Destroying warrior culture altogether is not an answer either (and a foolish idea besides), but I hope we can discover some other answer before the next war. Aliens maybe?
The problem is every time this is brought up, it's met with talk of how reform is possible, reform is the answer, you can't disband the police because $(blatantly_ridiculous_reason).
The police in this country are unaccountable, in a literal sense. There is no mechanism to hold them accountable; what exists to do this is inefficient, inaccessible to most people who may need to use it, and also largely ineffective even in the rare cases it does work.
And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons.
Policing in the United States is not broken, it's doing exactly what it was always intended to do: abusing poor people in the interest of the owning class. You can't reform that which is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
And if you hold officers accountable, then they won't overpolice minority neighborhoods, they won't beat people to death for sleeping in front of your buildings, they might hesitate to shoot someone in the back for stealing a $5 beer. I.e., they become less effective to the owning class. And that's why it doesn't happen.
Until this cultural gap is resolved, where we acknowledge not just what is happening but why it's happening and that it's happening was the intended, desired outcome, we can't move forward on it.
This separation of police and civilian is the core of the problem. The citizens of a country need to be able to perceive members of the police force as "one of us", rather than "one of them". In some countries the only real obstacle to reaching that point is that some people won't strictly adhere to a policy of de-escalation. In other countries there are of course far bigger, institutional, issues at play.
I’ll just admire it for a minute then adjust accordingly.
It is obnoxious though, we are expected to act in good faith with the ocifers, but they don't do the same.
Playing music to make a public space unrecordable seems like a flaw in how the public space works
Steps toward the generic nearly always lower discussion quality [1], because the larger the topic becomes, the harder it is to say anything new about it. Therefore the conversations tend to repeat the same points over and over, same as the last N times the topic came up (and this has been one of the most-argued, if not most burnt-out, topics in the last year). They also to get nastier as they proceed. My semi-serious theory is that the mind resorts to indignation to amuse itself in the absence of new information [2].
The generic topics are like massive planets that exert a strong pull on passing discussions—there's always a strong tendency to hop to the nearest generic orbit, because that's what our pre-existing mental associations connect to [3]. The trouble with this is that points away from curiosity, which is interested in new and specific information more than in familiar and general arguments. Curiosity wants the diffs—those are what's interesting [4]. Generally we're not aware of these competing directions in ourselves, but the effects show up unmistakeably at scale.
It's not that you or the other commenters did anything wrong! it's perfectly natural for conversation to drift in this way, and a balance of familiarity and curiosity makes for good conversation. But from a moderation perspective, it's our job to look out for the site globally, and try to dampen the sequences where each step makes sense locally but the sequence still ends up in a much less curious place.
That's a longer explanation than you probably expected, but since it's not possible to explain every individual move (it would be too much work, and also too noisy), I try to make up for it by periodically giving longer ones.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] And the hottest controversies are even stronger—those are like black holes: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Motives aside isn't a valid reduction of their action, the motives you have when you take an action are very much a part of whether that action is illegal. This is why both murder and manslaughter charges exist as separate crimes in most legal jurisdictions.
I don't know if this would be strictly illegal - it'll depend on what, precisely, police officers are required to do w.r.t. civilian oversight and it might require specific legislation to resolve. However, the intent of the police officers is to prevent people from filming, if they are attempting to accomplish this through playing music because more direct actions have been restricted then a court is probably not going to look kindly on their actions. As a parallel if you are barred from dumping hazardous materials on state park land and instead dump that on an interstate that passes through state park land a court will likely find you in violation.
If the cops are dumb enough to have put this in writing (most cops generally forget that text messages are admissable in court), it would seem that the government is intentionally restricting free speech.
Because it gives the impression that the cops have something to hide when they are triggering the Facebook copyright filter, seemingly on purpose. Caesar's wife must be above reproach.
Oh as I mentioned in a different comment I think this should be illegal and might already be illegal - but pulling some rando law out of the aether to force the charge isn't a great tactic.
Edit: Just to clarify, one of the other reasons I'm skeptical of using copyright law for this is because the intent doesn't match what the officer's intent would be allowing for officers to have a pretty good chance of avoiding any repercussions and because the penalties of sentencing are inappropriate. There are existing legal recourses in most instances for restricting the ability for civilians to record police incidents - if an officer is abusing copyright law to accomplish this silencing then they are likely running afoul of those laws and should be sentenced with breaking those laws since the penalties are more appropriate.
1. I'm going to guess it has happened sometime because racism, but it really shouldn't be. And thankfully a quick googling didn't turn up a litany of results.
> But every now and then, a business makes the decision to ignore the legal rights of the music creators that help them make money. We only pursue lawsuits as a last resort after multiple attempts to negotiate with the licensee in question.
https://www.ascap.com/help/ascap-licensing/why-ascap-license...
If the officer is playing the music incidentally as they go about their day, would that be fair use?
I wonder if a de-music service would be feasible so that the copyrighted audio within a video would be detected and suppressed without suppressing the video and other noises.
The license to share tends not to be transitive.
They might be doing this improperly for now, but it's not hard to fix.
The exclusive license could be found unconstitutional though?
If you’re just turning up a broadcast radio station, I don’t think that is public performance.
It's ridiculously obvious, otherwise, literally anything with a speaker would practically be banned.
The person making a video with the music as part of the content, may be technically subjected to DRM, or rather, when they upload it they will be.
I hope the RIAA comes down hard on this. Just as hard as they came down on Napster, tbh.
1) That, of all police departments in the world, this is done by Beverly Hills Cops is a sign, that we're living in a simulation
2) How broken must a society be, if all of the outrage is directed towards police officers playing filter-triggering music and not towards the environment in wich this becomes a thing in the first place.
Assuming that Beverly Hills is not the economically worst-off part of the US, I wonder if this is again another example of class-war in disguise (i.e. upper class kids pretending to be civil rights leaders by forcing working class officers to be their youtube material).
1. Poor people exist in Beverly Hills.
2. It would be unsurprising if the bulk of policing in Beverly Hills is directed toward poor people. This is how most upper income areas work (and not just in the US).
3. The characterization of police reform advocacy as a class war against the working class is... an amazing example of the power of propaganda. Especially in the context of an article in which a police officer is intentionally working to avoid accountability and the person being policed is decidedly not upper class.
I grew up in a very affluent area, not that different from Beverly Hills. The locals describe the police officer's job as "to keep the riff raff out." They basically just harassed anyone that didn't look rich and white enough to be there.
That's quite different from someone who posts a single bad encounter to be held accountable. He seems to be provoking the police for profit.
By having a different background and life experience from yours. Stretch a little.
Any arrest, detainment, or evidence collected with copyrighted music in the background originating from officer controlled equipment becomes inadmissible in court. Repeated infractions stand as grounds for dismissal of an officer for conduct unbecoming.
Sit back, bust out the popcorn, and settle in for the hilarity that ensues. Apologies to any forensics specialists whose habit is to do their work with music on.
I mean. If we're going for passive aggression, let's do it right. Your move lawman.
Also, screw the absurdity of our legal system in this regard.
In this case I suspect the person filming is well known to the police for filming and has a long history of interaction with them.
I don't think you are implying that it is ok for cops to be doing something that is specifically to prevent open sharing of their behavior via common 'platforms'.
I also don't think your comment related to the implications at all... which is why your comment is provocative.
I wanted to react negatively, accusing you of willful subversion, but all I can do is wonder if you did this intentionally knowing that you would get a reaction.
Regardless, I'll explain why your statement is meaningless. Police are here to serve and protect. They serve at the public's discretion. If they do anything to reduce awareness of the public's ability to analyze their performance or behavior while on duty, they are no longer serving or protecting. They should be fired.
Social media isn't a great source of truth and transparency.
If they put their hand in front of the lens, are they preventing recording? If they take the phone and put it in a box but leave it on, are they preventing recording?
I'd be interested in hearing that argument. Please go ahead and make it.
If the officer's intent is playing music with the outcome of causing an invalid copyright strike or otherwise causing harm to the citizen, then it could be easily argued that the officer is restricting free speech.
Uploading the video to social media would be considered protected speech in the sense that it would be unconstitutional for a government agent to intentionally act in a way that prevents it. The intent is critical here, and the officer would have to defend himself by justifying his bizarre behavior.
If you're live-streaming to social media, the record is being created on the social media site. The recording is not complete until it is saved on that site.