Why are so many cops blasting music while being filmed? [video] | Hacker News Reader

Why are so many cops blasting music while being filmed? [video]

youtube.com

43 pointsJugurtha32 comments

Multiple earlier discussions in Feb and Jul this year, linked from this comment by dang over 2 weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27716367

"so many"

How many?

I've seen a number of articles on this and mostly the same videos. I feel like this is akin to twitter outrage where I don't doubt a thing happened ... I just can't gauge how much it happens vs. how much coverage there is.

Yeah, the same exact fact got twisted so much that you feel you have a giant wave.

I don't think it's very common. I think some departments are starting to tell officers not to do this. It's unprofessional and a complaint should be filed against any officer doing it.

I wouldn't be surprised if a number of departments just as policy outright told them "Don't do this, it makes you look silly / guilty of something."

i'd think self-hosting or smaller platforms might be able to circumvent this...

I've may have asked before but...

Why aren't the cops hit with license violations for public performance of these songs? They likely don't have a BMI license (or... whatever you need).

You and I both know that would be way too cool to happen in real life.

If you watch the video, they cover this ("Why aren't the cops hit with license violations for public performance of these songs?") - basically, a judge would have to be convinced by the rightsholders that they intended for the music to be heard by a wide audience, which is clearly the opposite of what they want.

It's the same reason that you can't be "hit with license violations" for listening to music in your car with the windows down, effectively.

Intend, or are aware it will happen?

> a judge would have to be convinced by the rightsholders that they intended for the music to be heard by a wide audience, which is clearly the opposite of what they want.

I would actually argue exactly that they are intending for the music to be heard by a wide audience. Their audience is "anyone physically around so they know that filming will have this affect".

There is another element here. The courts have ruled that police actions on duty and in public interactions are consider public and not subject to most privacy laws, including recording them without permission. This means that their actions can be recorded and broadcast (the very reason they are playing this music to avoid that). It shouldn't matter what the intent is if they are a public figure, then they should know that others can film them and that recording can be broadcast. So they know they are being recorded as a public official and that it could be broadcast to a wider audience. Playing a song to try to limit that broadcast is a completely illogical and stupid idea. If they didn't play it, there wouldn't be any copyright music to be concerned with. By playing it, they know this video could be broadcast on platforms or media that don't filter and that it absolutely, without question, leads to unlicensed reproduction.

Basically standards for public officials are different from normal people.

> Basically standards for public officials are different from normal people.

I agree in general, but don't see how that applies in this case.

I don't see any difference to your parent's example of someone playing music with their car windows down. Driving a car out in public, you don't have an expectation of privacy and can be filmed by any passerby, and "this video could be broadcast on platforms or media that don't filter and that it absolutely, without question, leads to unlicensed reproduction."

"you don't have an expectation of privacy and can be filmed by any passerby"

That's not true in every state. Many states require consent, or at least implied consent through notification of recording, or have restrictions on how such recordings can be used/broadcast.

Do stores (or government buildings) need a license to play music? They are public spaces/entities and know that people can hear and record the music. Do you need a license to play music at a family BBQ even though the neighbors can hear it? No.

"Why aren't the cops hit with license violations for public performance of these songs?"

Because when you're in a position of power you get to do what you want. But probably also that playing on a personal device is not considered public performance (although courts have ruled officer actions on duty are public and recording them is not subject to privacy most laws, which could make it public performance, but good luck getting a court to agree)

Self-hosting has essentially no ability to reach people. You'll be DoS'd off the map if your video is even remotely popular. You need a real platform to reach the public. That's why people care about the moderation and takedown policies of the big platforms. Self-hosting won't ever solve the problem.

Are copyrights like trademarks? i.e. if you don't enforce them, they stop existing?

That would be convenient.

It seems not too terribly difficult to subtract the copyright audio from the videos.

Step 1: Identify the audio being played via Shazaam or similar algorithms.

Step 2: Find the overlap between the copyright song and the video's audio, because it won't be a perfect match.

Step 3: Subtract that audio from the video's audio.

It wouldn't be perfect and I'll bet it creates a lot of weirdness if, say, the office sings your Miranda Rights to the same tune as the song, but overall it would work and it would help stamp out this sort of problem. You could make a website that does this for uploaded videos.

I'm actually really curious to find out whether this would work. It sounds quite easy to test, I wonder if anyone has already done it?

My feeling is that it wouldn't work very well at all, because of things like the Doppler effect shifting the sound as you move the mic closer to or further from the source, and also the sampling on the microphone might be out of phase with the original recording. But the more I think about it, the more I think those might only be minor problems and it would actually work well?

EDIT: And the frequency response of the speaker & microphone are almost certainly non-uniform.

EDIT2: From a quick test, it doesn't even slightly work. Here's what I did:

1. Find a song on youtube

2. Save the song to an MP3 with https://www.bestmp3converter.com (or use youtube-dl - bestmp3converter.com probably uses youtube-dl)

3. Play the song on YouTube and record it using my phone

4. Load the MP3 and the recording from my phone in Audacity as 2 separate tracks

5. Amplify the phone recording until it looks like it matches the MP3 (Effect -> Amplify)

6. Delete some samples at the start of the phone recording so that the 2 tracks visually line up

7. Invert one of the tracks (Effect -> Invert)

8. Add the 2 tracks together (select both tracks, then Tracks -> Mix -> Mix and Render to New Track)

9. Mute the 2 original tracks and listen to the mixed result - it still sounds exactly like the song. It's not even slightly muffled. It sounds the same even if you don't invert one of the tracks. I think this is just much too far away from lining up sample-for-sample to be close to working.

In a job I had a couple of decades ago, I did work very much like this (not with music, but along the same lines). This certainly can be done, but your method isn't the way to do it.

There are two primary methods of accomplishing this. The fast and dirty method is to employ a notch filter to exclude all frequencies outside of those used by the human speaking voice (which, fortunately, is a rather narrow frequency range). The second is to perform some fancy mathemetics to be more selective about what you're filtering out and when. There are a number of different approaches to this, but they typically involve autocorrelations or crosscorrelations.

Both methods will cause a degradation of the audio you want to keep (the quick and dirty method will cause more degradation than the sophisticated methods). But the Q&D is often good enough, and is often used by karaoke machines and the like.

Simply trying to subtract out the known signal (as you were doing) is technically plausible -- and is done for certain types of signals -- but is very hard to do effectively. There are too many environmental effects that will distort the signal and make naive subtraction ineffective.

If that doesn't work, another option may be to link the video to the publisher of the song and provide the city/department name. I am not a lawyer, but hopefully one will chime in that is an expert on media content laws. Some publishers take public broadcasting of their works very seriously. Public broadcasting in this case is not just Youtube, but also the police officer playing for the audience in a public setting. Restaurant and bar owners are familiar with this. They are only allowed to play content for their customers that has been licensed to them and license does not mean a personal spotify account. There are fines for non-compliance. [1] This is not the same as blasting music in your car in case anyone draws the comparison. The officer is playing the music for their audience / customers with the intent of it being on Youtube. In my opinion it should be easy to prove intent in this case.

[1] - https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/on-the-line/a-crash-course-in-...

For those who don't want to watch a video for the answer: so that if the video gets posted to YouTube, it will get taken down by Google's copyright system.

Thanks

Your Text: 97 bytes, ~2 seconds to read

Youtube video: ~45000000 bytes, 5 minutes to watch.

I'll never understand it.

Spoiler alert: they hope that the copyrighted music stops the video being allowed to be shown on Youtube etc.

Yup. Minimal editing will remove the music though, plus it's still evidence in a court so it's an attempt to avoid public outrage.

App idea: Strip copyrighted music from a video while retaining voice. Shouldn't edit the original video though, it's evidence.

Interesting idea, but wouldn't the resulting video technically be a derivative work of the copyrighted music?

Not saying that kills the idea, it's just an extra complication.

I'd be surprised if that was the legal view. If I take a picture of someone next to the Mona Lisa and then crop the Mona Lisa out of it, that doesn't make the picture of the person a derivative work of the Mona Lisa.

I don't know if image cropping is a good metaphor. The algorithm for removing copyrighted music while preserving other sound presumably "subtracts" the copyrighted music. Thus, the copyrighted music is used to create the music-less video.

IANAL, so I defer to anyone with legal expertise.

They don't mean the end result but the process of detecting something requires you to have a copy of that work and hence your software needs the copyrighted material in order to detect copyrighted songs to remove accurately.

Even just removing the audio entirely from the affected sections and providing subtitles instead should do, surely? Point out that the perpetrator deliberately played music to try to prevent publication and they will lose any claim of the subtitles being false or edited in the court of public opinion. And surely this attempt to block publication will amplify any outrage.

It won't affect it's usefulness in recording a crime or misconduct for use in a complaint. Frankly, blasting or playing music during an interaction is unprofessional and people should file a complaint against any officer doing this.

Yeah. I'm not anti-police, but if they're doing that it's not a good sign.

or you can post your video on s3 buckets that don't use any copy write algorithm to block your evidence

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