Cops play music during filmed encounters to game YouTube's copyright striking | Hacker News Reader

Cops play music during filmed encounters to game YouTube's copyright striking

mashable.com

100 pointsafrcnc43 comments

Previous conversations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114959

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26082303

Discussed yesterday:

Police officer plays Taylor Swift song to keep a video off YouTube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27702325 - July 2021 (304 comments)

Also related (thanks thamer):

Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114959 - Feb 2021 (244 comments)

Police playing music while being filmed, seemingly to trigger copyright filters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26082303 - Feb 2021 (487 comments)

There's no way the cops doing this on duty have that music licensed for non-personal use. Where are the RIAA lawyers when you need them?

IANAL but spent a lot of time around DMCA and rights... I doubt the cop playing music on a paid Spotify account/etc in this way would be considered commercial reproduction. At least not by the cop - possibly the by the person uploading the video... and thus the issue and the opportunity for take-down.

I also deal a lot with music copyright, professionally. In this case it’s not about commercial reproduction of the recording, it’s about unauthorized public performance of the underlying work (composition).

If that was really enforceable then anyone playing music out of their phone speaker in public, eg on the bus, would be infringing. It's not a thing.

(why people insist on playing music in public out of their phone speaker in an annoying way is another topic!)

That is, in fact, infringement, however trivial. It’s obviously not something worth pursuing in court.

This a genius response to this if the RIAA actually cared. He is clearly using the music in a public performance as he intends for it to be added to an online video. If the RIAA gave a rats ass about anything but money they could get some serious brownie points by asking anyone who has this down to them to forward the videos so they can serve the individual cops.

If they could just sue the police departments as a whole, then they'd have the money they want.

It's not a genius response because it makes no sense. The police officer is not responsible for how some stranger filming him decides to use the footage.

> There's no way the cops doing this on duty have the music licensed that for non-personal use.

States are immune from copyright infringement:

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820381016/in-blackbeard-pirat...

Supreme Court has ruled that in general individuals cannot sue sovereign states without their permission in federal court

Can someone explain why this is the case?

11th amendment.

Municipalities do not enjoy the same freedom from responsibility.

Also, federal copyright preemption only covers "equivalent" laws. So, for instance, state "true name and address" laws could still be used.

I'm absolutely ignorant about those rules, but couldn't you sue the individual cop?

(un)qualified immunity makes this really hard.

My understanding is it only applies if the officer believes they aren’t violating the law? Given the explicit goal is triggering copyright enforcement that seems to negate such a claim?

Qualified Immunity has been interpreted so broadly that it is virtually unqualified - it is almost impossible to actually bring a case against a police officer for something that happens while they are on duty.

General incompetence and ignorance of the law have been used as justification for invoking qualified immunity. I'd be willing to bet there is almost no chance of successfully suing a police officer over something like this.

Yeah, and similarly they've been found to not be required to "protect and serve" :-/

This looks awfully like an idea from a dystopian cyberpunk fiction book. The title brings together the total surveillance, powerful corporations, and the social problems.

The dystopian cyberpunk is already here; it's just not very evenly distributed.

Cyberpunk is not a positive place to be. It's not a standard of living we should be aiming for.

Here's an idea for a song they should play: Rage Against The Machine - Killing In the Name https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXazVhlyxQ

An arms race, then. We need a service that does the minimum audio modification necessary to ensure the music can't be recognized by YouTube's copyright algorithms.

https://github.com/deezer/spleeter

The research side of "minimum modifications required" is with not quite there yet [0]. Audio source separation for now is probably the way to go (see other child comment). Although I imagine it would encounter similar problems with "over the air" type environments.

Black box transfers require large, audibly noticeable modifications. see "Transfer attacks against YouTube’s Content ID" audio example in [0].

Most work has focused on speech recognition, so see final appendix in [1], the authors of which are currently looking at the problem in more detail (stay tuned for results).

Also, over-the-air attacks require a lot more modification than attacks against image classifiers [2].

A lot of recent work (for voice at least) has found signal processing tricks are simple and efficient ways to deal with it [3]. But these untargeted attacks always run the risk of copyright detection flagging it as a different song instead of "not copyrighted".

So, basically, more research is required to get to the Fawkes "for audio" [4].

As an aside: I would not want to be "that guy" who invented the technology to defeat audio copyright detection systems. I think copyright is a good thing and would only work on something like that to help improve a given system. This specific issue should be handled by through some form of legal proceeding.

[0]: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~tomg/projects/copyrightattack/

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.06622

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.01551v1

[3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.05262

[4]: https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/

Edit: phone went mad and wouldn't let me type things.

I wouldn't think it to be exceptionally hard to do: a song is a fairly static piece of audio, with broadly available references. Using that reference to isolate and remove the song from the audio stream might not be easy, but it should be possible.

Put a very hard filter around the vocal range of sound, hopefully that would be enough to distort the music so that the algorithms can’t identify it.

Can't you just upload the video without sound?

Does the officer’s statement that he’s doing this to obtain a YouTube strike, while performing the work, make it subject to fair use? Seems arguable.

No. They don’t own the copyright of the song. That’s why it’s getting tagged by the algorithms.

Fair use wouldn't require the own the copyright since it would be considered newsworthy.

This, however YouTube is not friendly to fair use and makes appealing as scary as possible. They'd be better off doing a commentary video of the video while pausing the video every 30 seconds.

No, he is indicating that the unlicensed public performance of the work is deliberate.

As I wrote in a similar thread the other day, a possible solution would be to upload the video with a different audio track containing just a fsk encoded timecode plus location of the real one on a decentralized p2p network. Then a browser extension could pick the real audio track and play it in sync with the video in a transparent way.

Post them on some other video sharing site as well, surely there must be one somewhere that would work.

IPFS would buy time, even though the node operator could be subject to copyright infringement claims

We could do cross border pinning, where Russian servers are recruited to store and pin and just ignore copyright claims

An idea. By filming that creative cop I am providing witness services, basically volunteer job for the Government. Should be free from copyright conditions then.

I am glad police departments are raising awareness about our broken copyright system.

Hopefully some work can be done now to fix it.

Clever ploy but dubious at best. i get the feeling its akin to the audible version of a free speech zone.

Which part is dubious? Do you think this ploy will not work and that Youtube will somehow allow these particular videos to be posted?

Typically the videos are allowed regardless, however it changes the dynamics of advertising and where those residual earnings are attributed for the ad views (if present)

They can say whatever they want. But it just shows that they're scumbags without the trace of honor and integrity.

Normally they must be immediately sued for playing copyrighted music in public while on duty. Unfortunately the big brother had decided that the government is immune to to copyright violations.

I am pretty sure that Russia / China and whole bunch of other countries will be more than willing to host it on their video services.

Congrats.

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