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Really this police officer should be charged criminally as well... with intentional copyright infringement.

Someone else elsewhere in this thread is citing some civil rights statute, but the idea of charging with copyright infringement is just... amusing. If only prosecutors didn't hate charging cops.

Unfortunately in the US the government is immune from copyright infringement.

PS. Taking it back as I was proven wrong

This is incorrect (in the normal civil context), as discussed elsewhere in this thread.

But also, I'm suggesting criminally charging the individual officers, not the government. Police officers are not generally immune to criminal laws, so citation requested that they would be in this instance (it is possible, there are certainly some weird exceptions in the law for LEO, but I'm not aware of one here).

>"But also, I'm suggesting criminally charging the individual officers, not the government."

You might have a problem with prosecution agreeing to prosecute such case I think.

False:

https://www.nolo.com/legal-updates/u-s-postal-service-liable...

I am glad to be proven wrong.

States indeed have sovereign immunity from copyright lawsuits:

> On March 23, 2020, the Supreme Court held that the provisions of the Copyright Act subjecting states to liability for infringement did not validly abrogate states’ sovereign immunity from suit. As a result, copyright owners suffering infringement by state entities cannot seek the remedies provided by the Copyright Act.

https://www.copyright.gov/policy/state-sovereign-immunity/

Correct, though the assertion here was that the Federal government has immunity.

Practically speaking it almost does not matter in this context. Cops playing music will most likely be state cops, not feds.

Police are typically city or county (latter are sheriffs in most states). Not specifically state government in those cases. There are state police, and usually, state highway patrol.

In that context, this action as described in the article would itself be an interesting counterargument to the SCOTUS decision / Library of Congress Copyright Office finding.

Apparently this was just changed by the SC in a March 2, 2020 case. There's a citation elsewhere in the thread.

That covers suits against states, not against the US government.

The state exemption is apparently based on a sovereignity clause, though ... that seems somewhat twisted and wrong to me.

I'm thinking of ways that might exploit this.

Say, for the sake of argument, that a state government decided it wanted to host and provide legal cover for Sci-Hub.

Or an entity of state government. Maybe, say, the University of California Library.

Unless it comes out of their pocket it’s still the taxpayers funding their misdeeds.

And that's actually fine, because sheriff is an elected office. The good citizens of Alameda County voted for a sheriff who enables warrior cops, they get to pay for the cops' actions because they support the state of affairs.

Presented with no comment, the part of the article about the alameda county sheriff:

> The Alameda County Sheriff's Department has learned from this Streisanding, and has since made it official policy to forbid the playing of copyrighted content for the sole purpose of thwarting the recording of officers by members of the public.

What pool of candidates is the sheriff allowed to be elected from?

In many counties the candidates for sheriff must be active employees of the department or similar, making for an extremely narrow pool of candidates with plenty of opportunity for the incumbent to make their competitors ineligible to run.

> the candidates for sheriff must be active employees of the department or similar

Who made these inane rules? At the end of the day, if a county goes bankrupt for enacting stupid measures, it's on its citizens. Especially if they didn't even bother voting.

Anyone filing a valid candidacy application can run for the office in Alameda County (or in California AFAIU, where the state Secretary of Sate defines qualifications).

https://www.acvote.org/candidates/how-to-run

Ballotpedia has a more complete narrative description:

https://ballotpedia.org/How_to_run_for_office_in_California

It's not even clear to me that there is an minimumm age requirement for municipal or state office. There are a set of petition and/or filing-fee requirements.

Alabama is a state in which I might expect more stringent requirements to be in place. Those are: 18+ years of age, 1 day+ state residency, 1 day+ US citizen, and registered voter. Terms are 4 years, with no limit on terms served.

https://www.sos.alabama.gov/alabama-votes/candidates/qualifi...

Peoples rights and the threat of their abridgement shouldn't be subject to the financial whims of the electorate.

I know. The abuse should have been caught earlier. But when leadership does stupid, the force of the market provides the last stop.

Well, you wait for the market and let's see how long it takes to fix this. Much more likely, direct citizen action will address this long before.

The "market"?

Even for those obsessed with the primacy of market forces to solve all things, counting on them to solve bad police sounds...well, I can't really say how that sounds on HN, because the moderation is too good here. :)

It doesn't surprise me it's Alameda Sheriff's department.

They have one requirement besides a GED, and it BDS (big, dumb, stupid).

They are known for doing stupid stuff around the country.

I grew up with the guy who runs the Coroner's a office, and literally thought he was developmentally disabled.

(CA decided to nix voted in Coroners a few years ago, and replaced all with cops to save money. A Coroner is an executive position. Needs no training. In Marin County, we had a great Coroner, who was a medical doctor, for years.)

Rather, why isn’t software available yet for end users to filter out copyrighted background noises?

I wonder if, for everyone to get their cut still, you'd have to license the music to generate the anti-music pattern.

I actually just mapped it out in my business ideas note folder and yeah. I don’t see how you can build a decent tool for this job without having copies of the actual waveforms requiring some form of commercial license, however it would not need to be a performance license which seems to be the thing the publishers are most familiar licensing. So I’m not sure if this would make the process easier or harder but I definitely don’t see how they can argue the rights to use but not play the music are more valuable so they should in theory be cheaper than the sort of price iTunes and Spotify are paying per track.

It should be part of the YouTube post-upload processing. You find another YouTube link of the offending music, it syncs the two audio tracks, and removes from your upload.

Adding audio is much easier than subtracting audio from a recording when said audio is distorted by imperfect speakers and recorded by imperfect microphones and has who knows what other background noises mixed in.

Said denoiser could easily destroy the audio your looking to preserve, and the altered audio is not good quality evidence of the events that occurred.

There is software like Spleeter [1] that can split songs into stems (seperate drums, vocals, rhythm, etc.) using ML. I imagine it would be possible to adapt it for this. Might even work as-is if you only needed to isolate people's voices.

1. https://github.com/deezer/spleeter

The government has immunity from copyright lawsuits.

Is this true? I remember a while ago USPS lost a copyright suit for using a photo of the statue of liberty from the Las Vegas hotel on a stamp.

Edit:https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/07/post-office-owes...

It's more so the govt needs to allow you to sue the govt...sooo

> On March 23, 2020, the Supreme Court held that the provisions of the Copyright Act subjecting states to liability for infringement did not validly abrogate states’ sovereign immunity from suit. As a result, copyright owners suffering infringement by state entities cannot seek the remedies provided by the Copyright Act.

https://www.copyright.gov/policy/state-sovereign-immunity/

> The government has immunity from copyright lawsuits.

That's kind of (but not very) true of the Federal government [0]. It's not at all true of state governments or local governments.

[0] They have somewhat different liability than normal actors, which can only be pursued in the Court of Federal Claims.

Nope, federal government too:

https://www.nolo.com/legal-updates/u-s-postal-service-liable...

> On March 23, 2020, the Supreme Court held that the provisions of the Copyright Act subjecting states to liability for infringement did not validly abrogate states’ sovereign immunity from suit. As a result, copyright owners suffering infringement by state entities cannot seek the remedies provided by the Copyright Act.

https://www.copyright.gov/policy/state-sovereign-immunity/

Citation requested.

Chapters 1 & 5 of 17 USC address limitations on exclusive rights or remedies. I see no government exclusion:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/chapter-1

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/chapter-5

You may be confusing the lack of copyright protection in US Government works, 17 USC 105:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/105

Congress has specifically cancelled state immunity against copyright suit:

The US government has been successfully sued for copyright violation:

https://www.nolo.com/legal-updates/u-s-postal-service-liable...

> On March 23, 2020, the Supreme Court held that the provisions of the Copyright Act subjecting states to liability for infringement did not validly abrogate states’ sovereign immunity from suit. As a result, copyright owners suffering infringement by state entities cannot seek the remedies provided by the Copyright Act.

https://www.copyright.gov/policy/state-sovereign-immunity/

Thanks.

That's been effective for ... about two weeks then. Brand spankin' new.

The report is new, the SCOTUS case was last year.

What happens if a state decides ... say ... that it wants to host Sci-Hub?

Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan would be proud of that.