This is an evolution of the story that first appeared on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26082303
It’s strange that so many people are arguing for using copyright law against the cop, instead of realizing that it’s absurd that we have to think about having videos taken down for background music.
That said, I’m not even convinced that background music can get the videos taken down, since we’ve all been watching these videos on social media platforms for the past few days.
It might be absurd that someone is shooting bullets at you but you should shoot back if that's the case.
The "shooting back" solution just ends up with a bunch of people injured (likely including random bystanders). The better solution is to get the shooting to stop entirely.
We don't need to find a new interpretation of copyright law to attack the cop, we need to remove the dysfunctional copyright system that started this. Or in your metaphor, I want no-one to get shot rather than wanting to shoot back.
Censoring is indeed legal if companies do it, but this is functionally State censorship.
This is not State censorship, because the police are not censoring the videos. People still get to record them, and still get to share them. If they can't be bothered to post somewhere other than Instagram (which is abusing their rights), then the failure to share is on the people doing the posting.
There's nothing stopping the people who recorded the videos from sending them to the news media. The recordings are still getting made.
They're just being removed by some bot from the Instagram feeds. Shame on Instagram.
I don’t think a “websites can’t moderate their content” is a good road to go down.
This story, fake news, the shenanigans around the election, etc has shown they are bad stewards of this responsibility.
Police definitely have zero "expectation of privacy" when out on the job and it's a fairly well established legal fact. Additionally, this information was available at the time they decided to become police officers.
IANAL.
That sounds awful. Everybody needs to go out even if it is to buy groceries. What that means is that you can be recorded and there is nothing you can do about it.
My ¢2.
It is important for a society to be able to monitor the enforcers of the government, i.e. the police. To me, it seems pretty reasonable for people to be able to record the actions of the police in public spaces, so long as its not impeding the ability for the officers to correctly do their job.