Police playing music while being filmed, seemingly to trigger copyright filters
vice.com
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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.
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?
The status quo where YouTube is full of voluntarily uploaded material by rightsholders, other videos featuring their songs (for which the rightsholders get compensated) and even some cover bands getting revenue share, and most copyright-struck videos just get demonetised sounds a lot better than the RIAA simply trying to get everything taken down.
Judging by the amount of unofficial Santeria videos on YouTube, I don't think anyone would struggle to publish cop videos with Sublime playing in the background on there anyway.
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.
YouTube and their partners intentionally sidestep the DMCA takedown rules in favor of their own system which doesn't have these rules. The point of Content ID is to remove the barriers the law and the DMCA have, in favor of an arbitration system which (mostly) sides with big rightsholders.
Most? To my knowledge in the history of the DMCA not a single person has been hit with a perjury claim, not even the most egregious vexatious claimant.
What about it? It only applies if it can be shown that you intentionally lied. There is absolutely zero penalty for negligence. Even a $20 fee for misfiling would lead to a drastically different environment around DMCA notices.
Here is the exact text from the DMCA from https://www.aclu.org/other/text-digital-millennium-copyright...
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly in-fringed.
Note the particular phrasing. The requirement that the information in the notification be accurate is not under penalty of perjury. The only thing that is under penalty of perjury is that you can only DMCA claim things that you have copyright to (or are a lawyer representing that entity).
And it's worse than that, because you can claim something that is totally unrelated without this penalty as long as you own the copyright you claim to be enforcing.
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.
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.
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.
And it seems very difficult to calculate a percentage among mixed works.
The ultimate goal is to put as much work into the public domain as possible, since that was the original goal of the framers of the Constitution.
If you want more renewals to avoid orphan works, I'd just add more renewals. They don't need to cost much.
And the most effective way to get copyright to expire on bigger holders is to set a fixed time limit.
I dislike the idea of having "most" copyright expire quickly while the rest doesn't, because longer copyright is going to disproportionately be on big works owned by big holders. I don't think you should have that as a goal at all.
So I think you should just go with a fixed time limit. Like the original 28 years.
And a mechanism to avoid abandonment is a good idea, but make it fair to everyone.
... which were expensive to create, generally. Remember, copyright is not intended as a "reward" or a tool for social redistribution, it is intended to incentivize creating new works.
An argument can be made that allowing the $100m movie production to pay for longer copyrights than the $1,000 amateur shoot gives the creators an incentive to run bigger budget risks, because they can monetize it better.
(I don't agree and I do think 28 years of blanket protection should be enough, but the argument is valid.)
And big projects with big advertising budgets probably recoup their money faster than small projects.
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.
The main points are 1) Payment every year that gets cost prohibitive and 2) Annual registration to solve the abandoned works problem.
I can't imagine someone saying, "I want to work on this idea, but I won't because I know it won't be profitable for many years".
IP is often owned by offshore entities not subject to any taxation whatsoever, or minimal at best (1-3% range). It then gets rented to onshore entities that actually use it, and they pay enormous IP licensing fees for that.
You can't fix complexity by building up even more complexity, something must be simplified instead.
> 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.
> 99.999% of copyright-eligible works are commercially worthless and always will be
Then it should be no problem to have it in the public domain.
> 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
Why?
> 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.
Why? The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to pursue risky creative endeavors and then know that they are protected from someone stealing it before they can make money on it. If someone has no intention of making money, then they will create for free, and there is no reason to protect it. If they want to make money, they can register it.
But if I create something without expecting it to be successful why shouldn't that be protected on the off chance it does end up being successful?
Copyright is not meant to protect your profits. It's meant to encourage creative risk taking. If you're going to take the creative risk anyway, then copyright isn't necessary.
Copyright encourages creative risk taking precisely by protecting the economic interests (e.g., profits) of those creative risk takers.
> If you're going to take the creative risk anyway, then copyright isn't necessary.
People don't take risks when there's zero possibility of reward. Even people who create mainly for themselves would be demoralized by the idea that even if they were successful, anyone could just take and exploit their work.
The point is registration won't affect creative output.
Currently, most works are only registered when owners have an actual infringer that they want to assert statutory damages against, or when a work is a commercial work that will certainly be infringed. If mandatory registration were enacted, the Copyright Office would need to handle hundreds or thousands of times as many registrations.
Even an impossible 1000x expansion of registration capacity wouldn't come close to being able to register everything that people would actually want to protect. For example, a user on Quora [2] estimated that 100 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day. Even if registration were free and streamlined, the yearly capacity of a 1000x Office would be saturated by 5 days of Instagram photos alone.
If registration were mandatory, commercial producers of creative works would not be affected because they would quickly learn to register everything. Ordinary people who don't want their Instagram photos to be exploited by others for profit, however, would lose. Opportunists who want to use the works of others without paying would win.
So, even if mandatory registration didn't affect creative output, it would be ridiculously expensive and would upset who wins and who loses in a way that would be counter to the public interest. It's never going to happen.
Goals in copyright policy should be addressed narrowly. If you want more works to enter the public domain, then you adjust the copyright term. If you want people to be able to use apparently-abandoned works, then you make apparent abandonment a defense to a claim of copyright infringement. If you want to expand Fair Use, then you amend the statute. Mandatory registration, however, would be a dramatic change that would upset everything; it's not worth discussing and I regret spending so much time on this response.
[0] https://www.copyright.gov/reports/annual/2019/ar2019.pdf
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/about/budget/2020/senate-budget-te...
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-photos-are-being-uploaded-on-...
"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.
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.
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.
>Merely being aghast at extrajudicial killings doesn’t stop them
I genuinely don't know what point you're trying to make.
> Copyright law is the real problem and not the extrajudicial murder of citizens by police?
I am pointing out why this is a false dichotomy.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
If they were indemnified by law and even worse liable for penalties if they keep the current system, then they would quickly change it.
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.
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.
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.
Example: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/news/read.cfm?id=28147...
The mother of the affected was telling people to go away, but they were so desperate to push their own agenda they ignored it. The BWC videos are on YouTube.
For mostly-good reasons, in any court case judges and juries will tend to believe what a police officer tells them happened. So in any situation where a police officer and an ordinary citizen are one-on-one, if the ordinary citizen thinks the police officer is, or might be, acting wrongly then recording the events may be their only hope of getting justice if that happens.
If there are multiple police officers and one civilian, you might hope that one police officer would report on another's misdeeds. Unfortunately, there's an awful lot of reason to think that that doesn't generally happen, and that what actually happens is that one police officer backs up another against civilians, even if they have to lie to do it.
A police officer interacting with a private citizen is (supposed to be) acting on behalf of The People, to uphold The Law. What possible reason could there be not to record what they do in that capacity?
In fact, their signatures/actions should be invalid unless properly announced and distributed all their voters.
Otherwise people feel so extreme and polarised. You've got Hawaii and Bay Area liberals vs rednecks. Both are very strong with their opinions.
It was a violent encounter with police officers that led to the proposal that they wear body cameras (https://www.wired.com/story/body-cameras-stopped-police-brut...)
Even with the use of them, the release of them is often blocked or their existence is denied.
From the above article: " In Baltimore three years ago, one of the devices caught a police officer as he planted drugs at a crime scene; he was later convicted for fabricating evidence. After Rayshard Brooks was fatally shot by a cop in Atlanta on Friday, body cam footage of the incident was quickly released, and the officer was fired. "
I am not sure this is entirely correct. Generally speaking, law-abiding citizens are not the ones that police have to worry about anyway (regardless of if they are carrying guns). Citizens that are not law-abiding (criminals), on the other hand, are the people that police generally need to be concerned about. It does not seem like a great idea to assume these people are not armed simply because they "are not allowed to carry guns."
Admittedly, the absolute saturation of American culture with guns is not making the cop's jobs any easier, but the answer to these problems is way more complicated than disarming law-abiding citizens.
But I would not know how to get rid of guns in the US now, because there are just too many guns around, and "non-law-abiding" citizens will still carry them.
A citizen should not carry a gun. Doesn't matter if they are "law-abiding" or not.
There is no difference between the two and to pretend like there is a difference is how we get the same people chanting both "we need to punish criminals more severely!" and "It's shameful the US has so much of it's population in prison"
edit: But also, how do you expect a COP to be able to differentiate between the 2 in the field? They are essentially the ones that gets to decide who is a criminal or not which brings us back to how the police are given the ability to abuse their power.
Certainly there is no difference between them in terms of their human dignity and (unless otherwise specified by law) their rights as citizens. But it seems illogical to assert that there is no difference at all between a person who has broken a law and a person who has not...
Are you sure the problem is guns? What makes you so sure? I am genuinely interested, because Serbia is known for having lots of guns, too, but firearm-related death rate is low, vs. Honduras, which has much less guns per 100 inhabitants and extremely high firearm-related death rate that is homicide.
In any case, here is the table:
| Country | Homicide | Guns per 100 inhabitants |
| US | 4.46 | 120.5 |
| Serbia | 0.72 | 37.82 |
| Honduras | 28.65 | 9.9-11.24 |
What do you think explains this? Curious to explore.
| Country | Homicide | Guns per 100 inhabitants |
| US | 4.46 | 120.5 |
| Serbia | 0.72 | 37.82 |
| Honduras | 28.65 | 9.9-11.24 |
| | | |
| Cyprus | 0.50 | 36.4 |
| Canada | 0.72 | 34.70 |
| Finland | 0.20 | 32.4 |
| ... | | |
| | | |
| Jamaica | 38.20 | 5.8 |
| Eswatini | 37.16 | 8.1 |
| Brazil | 23.93 | 8.6 |
| ... | | |
"Where there are more guns there is more homicide."
"Across high-income nations more guns = more homicide."
"Across states, more guns = more homicide."
"More guns = more homicides of police."
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...
Could it be that states with high homicide rates lead to people in those states buying more guns to feel more protected at home (and not the other way around)?
For a real life example, I live in Seattle, and we had a giant spike in the first-time firearm ownership numbers last year. It was driven by a lot of people who previously had zero interest in owning guns who suddenly became more concerned about their safety due to all the violence happening adjacent to protests, as well as due to the local District Attorney refusing to prosecute a lot of violent criminals with many repeated offenses and letting them out (to clarify: when I say "violent", I am not talking about protests, I am talking about people with multiple battery and assault charges, robbery, gang violence, rape, etc.). So in the Seattle scenario, it was indeed an increased rate of crime and homicides that caused a spike in firearm ownership, not the other way around.
And what about Switzerland, with their extremely high rate of gun ownership but low rate of homicides?
I don't have an answer to these questions, but it makes me feel like it is a bit less simplistic than just "higher rates of gun ownership in high-income nations create higher homicide rates".
Politics is broken if the DA is not effectively enforcing laws. Guns can't fix it. (Just as every surveillance thread on HN has comments about "technology can't really fix this, it's a politics problem", guns are very much just technology when it comes to socioeconomics/politics of crime.)
Switzerland has very high regulation. Not just for guns, for everything. And a very effective (almost direct) democracy. And an almost universal very-very-very high standard of living. (Yet their suicide rate is pretty high! Used to be higher than the US' - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-death-rates?tab=c... ) Gun ownership there is more of a cultural heritage, and very much not a safety device.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-guns-do-not-...
There are many, many words written on how great guns are or how grave problem they are. I completely accept that if the plurality want this so be it, it's not as deadly as many other problems.
It is obviously not something that can be blamed on any specific individual, and it's only based on what things looks like from the outside, but the impression is there regardless.
The ridiculous amount of wars the US wages upon other countries also contribute to that image, but I suspect that's more related to the US fighting seemingly neo-colonial wars with European support than anything else. If European contribution had been on the same level, that factor would probably not be included.
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.
Maybe instead of sending 100 SWAT troops to deal with people marching in a street, then can send 20 cops to keep an eye on things and put the other 80 in a training class.
...right?
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.
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.
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).
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
I'd imagine you could make a mint baiting the RIAA if you were ok with being as sleazy as them
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...
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...
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...
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"
Misapplying the law because a private company does something is not a logical argument.
>"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_...
(I don't agree with you that the original purpose was restricted to protecting revenue. The original purpose of copyright law is to codify the moral rights associated with creative works. Moral rights are fundamentally a property right connecting the work to the person. When we hear that an artist tries to prevent their works being distorted by being associated with a certain political campaign, this is an appeal to this kind of right, not revenue.)
no, unlicensed public performance is itself a breach of copyright.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/music-public-performance-r...
It's completely unambiguous.
cops weren't playing music to themselves though, they were playing it at a protest, audible to all the public participants.
> It's completely unambiguous.
what's your angle here? like yes, this is completely unambiguous, you can't do what the cops are doing, that is public performance of music. why are you digging for a reason to justify what is clearly an illegal action?
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...
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.
> 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...
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).
[1]https://m.dpreview.com/news/0190365065/apple-patents-system-...
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.
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.
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".
If the rights are held by a major label, then they don't care a single thing about the artist's permission. For example, a few years ago or so, Madeon's soundcloud account (a big EDM artists) got a bunch of his own songs removed due to the label being the one actually holding the rights. The artist himself was pretty pissed about this.
But if the rights are held by the artists or by a small independent label, then they get to give out the permission.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm proposing a gentler version of that that would be open to more people.
What you are describing is corruption and would be illegal.
I would also note that public support of the arts is nothing new. This is simply a generous expansion that qualitatively changes the relation of artists to markets and to the public.
For example: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/hope-for-america/government-sup...
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.
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.
I mean, thinking of a hack. I could distribute two sound files that alone don't sound like anything much, but if you run them through such an inverter, it produces a copyrighted song. I'd guess the legal system would jump on me and claim one of my files has a music-shaped-hole in it that infringes on the original work.
The example used in this article uses one-time pad to produce random noise and an appropriate key that, when XORed together, produces a copyrighted work. No worky in the eyes of the law.
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.
Excerpts from: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/you-have-first-amendme....
> You have a First Amendment right to record the police. Federal courts and the Justice Department have recognized the right of individuals to record the police. Although the Supreme Court has not squarely ruled on the issue, there is a long line of First Amendment case law from the high court that supports the right to record the police. And federal appellate courts in the First, Third, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits have directly upheld this right. EFF has advocated for this right in many amicus briefs.
> The right to record the police unequivocally includes the right to take pictures and record video. There is an added legal wrinkle when recording audio—whether with or without video. Some police officers have argued that recording audio without their consent violates wiretap laws. Courts have generally rejected this argument. The Seventh Circuit, for example, held that the Illinois wiretap statute violated the First Amendment as applied to audio recording on-duty police officers.
> There are two kinds of wiretaps laws: those that require “all parties” to a conversation to consent to audio recording (12 states), and those that only require “one party” to consent (38 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal statute). Thus, if you’re in a one-party consent state, and you’re involved in an incident with the police (that is, you’re a party to the conversation) and you want to record audio of that interaction, you are the one party consenting to the recording and you don’t also need the officer’s consent. If you’re in an all-party consent state, and your cell phone or recording device is in plain view, your open audio recording puts the officer on notice and thus their consent might be implied.
> Additionally, wiretap laws in both all-party consent states and one-party consent states typically only prohibit audio recording of private conversations—that is, when the parties to the conversation have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Police officers exercising their official duties in public do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy. Neither do civilians in public places who speak to police officers in a manner audible to passersby. Thus, if you’re a bystander and want to audio record an officer’s interaction with another person in a public space, regardless of whether you’re in a state with an all-party or one-party consent wiretap statute, you may audio record the encounter.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/11.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
Enforcement varies.
If you're broadcasting it electronically, like radio, it's OK as long as you have a blanket broadcast license.
Given the cop specifically asked and confirmed that there were people listening, he probably should have had a license.
Play a copyrighted track in your business lobby and see how long it takes ASCAP to track you down.
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.
Obviously, it's not.
Maybe uploading a video containing such music is.
If you are playing music to yourself, and someone films you - you are not infringing - the person filming and uploading is - possibly, though that's more questionable.
That cases are not pursed is incidental.
I imagine it's hard to build a case against the guy blasting his car radio without a recording, and the affected people aren't particularly unhappy with it.
If copyright was more like trademarks, and they had to protect it to keep it, you'd see more cases of people playing their music too loud.
We'll see the same happen with streaming services as smart TVs get popular. You'll have to pay per viewer as licenses change
If there is some random person filming you - then they are infringing - not you.
- Section 101 of the 1976 Copyright Act
Anyone playing the music to themselves is not playing it where 'a substantial number of persons' can hear it, nor are they projecting in such a manner.
If this were the case, then anyone playing music, anywhere would be in violation, which is obviously ridiculous and no, it's not about some odd technicality of the law.
It is straight up, 100% legal to play music to yourself.
Given that there are millions of instances of people doing this every day, and zero cases of infringement in these scenarios, it would seem both the letter of the law, and case history quite handily demonstrate how crazy the claim is.
HN threads descend into a weird distortion field when dealing with hot-button issues such as DRM, policing, NIMBYism, blockchain, privacy etc.
-> Someone playing music to themselves (and not filming themselves and putting said video in public) is not infringing on anything.
-> Someone filming someone else else playing music, may be infringing by virtue of the fact they are posting the content 'in public'.
I don't think it's a matter of 'a difficult case to make' against a person being filed while listening to music to themselves, there is no case.
The videographer, yes.
Twitch / Youtubers know this as they cannot stream DRM'd music in their streams, but of course, they are directly making said music public, in which case it's a legal problem.
Playing music to yourself, your friends etc. is 100% legal in all cases.
The cop doesn't need to make any arguments whatsoever about who it's being played for.
The person doing the filming and distributing is the person infringing.
It's completely obvious, there is no ambiguity.
The only approach, however hairbrained and ridiculous - would be for the IP owner to go after both the content video/distributor - and then somehow also rope the cop in as though they were somehow 'part of the preformative act' of making the video. But that's beyond a stretch.
In reality there are no hairs to split. If there is infringement, it's the person making the video.
[1] IANAL, etc, etc.
If you’re just turning up a broadcast radio station, I don’t think that is public performance.
Now that I think about it, if we could get ASCAP to go after the kids with their rattling cars... Hmmm!
Now on one hand, every day people will find this absurd. However, I am pretty sure it is not a defense that it’s not enforced evenly in all circumstances. A lot of people go 5mph over the speed limit without consequences; means nothing if you’re in court for it.
However, if you are acting in bad faith, you can expect people to become more creative with their use of the law against you. The police do this all the time.
And I really, really don’t think we need to argue that the police officer here just really wanted to share his taste in music while being uncooperative and has no idea what’s going on.
P.S.: IANAL.
I do know lots of small businesses (pop-ups) use streamed media -so do company picnics and so on. It’s a thing. Officially I’m sure ASCAP frowns on this. On the other hand it’s a fruitless pursuit.
However, it might possibly become a different story in this case. Here is a pretty objectionable use of copyrighted music on a small scale. It makes copyright holders look bad because the system they lobbied for could now possibly be used to help corrupt or abusive police officers escape accountability and censor opposition. Ordinarily, a copyright holder taking action against a small scale case like this would seem like a David and Goliath situation, but in this case the “little guy” is not the person playing the music.
Acting in bad faith is, of course, one thing, when you are an individual and you are acting against a large conglomerate. It doesn’t justify the action, but the optics of enforcement are not great. Just remember issues like Mike Rowe Soft for example. (P.S.: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...)
This case is more complicated because the perceived wrong is not exactly the use of copyrighted music but how copyright systems are being used against a citizen exercising their rights.
It remains to be seen what happens, but if this sort of behavior continues I can at least bet on musicians not being very happy to hear when their music is used for this purpose.
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.
> 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...
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.
No more or less terrible than automatically removing the video of the officer is. It's the same law! If it's unethical to prevent an officer from playing music it's equally unethical to exploit someone else's enforcement of that law for reasons that have nothing to do with playing music.
Public performance isn't really some random law pulled out of the aether. It's one of the basic tenets of copyright and serves as the basis for the majority of copyright licensing in the U.S. Even the take-down process that the officer is looking to exploit exists because of the the rights holder's right to public performance (an Instagram video is a public performance).
That it is illegal (criminal) to willfully perform a copyrighted work in public is well established law and not the least bit random.
The point being that no rights holder, in their right mind would prospect someone for this, in the same way that they don't go after people walking around with boomboxes.
There might be a crazy example if this happening once. But mostly nobody gets prosecuted for walking around playing music on their phone.
As in, maybe there has been 1 or 2 times, in history, where a court has ever punished anyone, for merely walking around, playing music on their phone, if it has ever happened at all.
> there are plenty of bands that would be happy
And the band would waste a lot of money and lose in court doing that.
I am truly curious as to how far you actually think this goes. As in, do you truly believe, that, to give a more extreme example, if someone was walking around, and had headsets in, and was listen to music but someone walking next to them could hear it, that any court ever would call this a public performance?
I mean someone can hear it right? That makes it a public performance? No. That is ridiculous. This would never happen.
Because that is only a slightly more extreme situation.
Copywrite law would be completely meaningless, if you are willing to bit the bullet on these kinds of extreme hypotheticals.
In your headphone example, I'd say it's pretty clear that this would not be a public performance. Let's approach the problem from the other direction. If you have a store and play music over speakers in the store then this does count and stores pay licensing fees for this. What about if an employee regularly plays music with a bluetooth speaker while they're working at the cash register? This is a representative of the company playing music where customers can hear it so you could argue it still counts. What if they don't use the speaker and play the music directly over their phone's speakers? Does the quality of the speakers matter? What if instead of a store it's a government employee working somewhere like the DMV? Is the government exempt from copyright laws? What's the difference between the DMV employee and a cop? They both work for the government, doing a job where they interact with the public, and are playing music over speakers where the public around them can hear it.
At what point in that series does it stop being a public performance? Where exactly does the law draw the line? Is there even a clear line in established case law? Does that precedent vary depending on your location in the US? I would be surprised if there is relevant precedent for this example. There wouldn't normally be any incentive for anyone in the music industry to claim this type of scenario is a public performance. However, I think that changes when the police start doing this to as a way to avoid criticism.
I mean, if I were a business open to the public, playing music without paying the fees, I'd get in trouble. Here we have police business, open to the public, playing music, pressumably without paying the fees. Especially, if the officer is doing it when they know a recording is being made, that's an intentional act of public performance, or facilitating copying or somesuch prohibited conduct with copyrighted materials.
Also, depending on the volume, could be violating a noise ordinance.
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?
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.
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.
You can film them all you want, but they aren't forced to stand there. They can go away if they like.
I hope the RIAA comes down hard on this. Just as hard as they came down on Napster, tbh.
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?
Cut personnel in each branch by half, significantly consolidate bases, and modestly increase pay for the people who remain.
Then, redirect the enormous savings to actually useful jobs programs. Build roads instead of running around in circles in rural Alabama/North Carolina for four years.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/14/169364733...
Europe's not going to afford to carry out a successful land invasion of Russia anytime soon, but if that's the level of defense spending Trump was looking for, I'm glad he was told to pound sand.
Trump wanted to raise it to 4%.
Not true. The popular comparison is the US spends about as much as the next 10 countries combined. US is ~38% of the world's defense spending.
https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
As a percentage of GDP US defense spending is near its post WW II low.
In other words 4% of the world's population and 40% of its defense spending. Fucking jesus these feel like silly numbers to discuss -- the USA's military dumbassery puts Rome to shame. The latter collapsed because of its over-reach (well, unless you attended a conservative seminary, in which case it was clearly the "lack of morality on display in the Roman bath houses" or some such similar Very Serious Sociology/"Church History" That's Definitely Not Just USA Christian Nationalist Ur-Fascism.)
Economy size to defense spending is probably more a relevant ratio than population. 23% of the world economy, 38% of defense spending.
Defense spending is near all time lows. It didn't collapse the country in the 50s when it hit 11.3% of GDP. It didn't collapse the country in the 60s when it hit 8.6%. It didn't collapse the economy in the 80's when it hit 5.7%. We at sitting just over 3% now. If really you are worried that 3.4% going to cause the country to collapse, you can rest easy.
I just think you need to filter out the nut-jobs that think they're Rambo and view the streets as a warzone.
My suspicion is that the kinds of soldiers who become problem police officers are the soldiers who didn't actually face combat abroad. I imagine it's the kind of soldier who fantasized about front-line service but wasn't quite cut out for it for one reason or another and they've directed their disappointment about that into being an abusive police officer.
That said, yea, glory hounds would make really scary police officers.
The archetypical "warrior cop" is a non-veteran who likes military imagery but has no experience with military discipline or subordination.
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.
Became a complete hellhole as calls to burglary, home invasion and death threats would take an hour or more for county sheriff.
After numerous incidents sherif us told to get a gun; but gave a lot of warnings about how we would go to jail if we defended ourselves. Unless a very narrow range of criteria were met.
Moved as far as way as possible.
Perhaps only coincidentally, the department is struggling to hire and crime- both violent and nonviolent- is up. My friend's workplace just finished reinstalling bullet proof glass due to the rise in shootings and rock throwings.
That is nothing like what is being suggested here. The police haven't been abolished yet, but only because nobody can agree on what to have instead.
Most common suggestions are to have neighborhood watch, plugs social workers to be dispatched for most crimes- unless a gun is held to someone's head, there are city board members suggesting that police shouldn't be dispatched at all. Even in cases of rape, they're saying that social workers are better suited to "deescalate if necessary and to deal with the emotional trauma".
This is what the "abolish" advocates around here are pushing for- "abolish" not "start over with new offices in the same capacity as the old ones".
> We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service
There are indeed people who want to abolish the police. There are those who don't. That's why I said "depends who's suggesting a replacement": in this particular case the top-level comment was calling to create a police force with a different institutional culture, not to create some non-police institution.
About Camden: a rebuilding of the department involved massive cultural change, selectively rehiring to weed out bad influences, recreating the hierarchy to put more civilian-friendly people on top, and breaking the back of the police union. Rebuilding an organization to do the same task from the ground up let's you accomplish that. You're still going to end up hiring from the same talent pool, but those individuals can behave very differently in a different organizational culture.
Why should the same logic not apply to police forces?
Moreover, the threat of this happening would help whip a lot of other forces into shape.
Yes, we are. That's what "abolish police" means.
Could we please abolish the police force? They do far more harm than good.
The highest case clearance rates were for violent crime and aggravated assault (45.5% and 52.5%, respectively). These crimes typically occur between people who already know each other, and yet it's basically a coin flip whether the police will deliver a case for prosecution.
Think about how attractive a crime is when you have a 0.01% chance of going to jail for it vs a 13.9% chance of going to jail.
A clearance rate could be only a few percent and still be an effective deterrent if the marginal benefit of the crime over some other activity is enough worse than the punishment.
Also consider that a significant fraction of all crimes is committed by a small portion of the population. Even if we fail to send someone to jail for 90% of crimes they commit, eventually they are caught and removed from the community, preventing their future crimes -- stopping all the crimes they would have otherwise committed. The end point here isn't necessarily jail-- either, if they're caught once and scared straight the same thing applies.
It's insane to me that people would rather dump hundreds of millions of dollars into a pointless effort to try to terrorize communities into law-abidance rather than invest that money into addressing some of the material desperation and crises in mental health which would actually make our communities nicer to live in for everyone.
Nah. This is completely reasonable. We tend to have punishments that are large multiples of the benefits of committing the crime, because people know they will not likely be caught. So, you face the situation of doing something that you 90% know you'll get away with, but the remaining 10% is really, really inconvenient. And if you keep rolling the dice, you'll get caught eventually. (And in a perfect world, would be rehabilitated).
> Would you pay 30% of your salary to go to a hospital that historically only cured 3% of patients
NNT's tend to be pretty high for most medical interventions. e.g. statins. No mortality benefit, you need to treat 217 to prevent one nonfatal heart attack, and you need to treat 313 people to prevent one nonfatal stroke-- so about 0.5% see a benefit.
We pay a small percentage of our income to what becomes city budgets, so I think you're engaging in hyperbole to compare this small percentage of our salary that goes to policing to spending 30% of our salary.
I am paying a bunch of money for home insurance and it only rarely helps anyone...
This is another fantasy. It's only true for certain types of people. Are the punishments for crimes committed by police officers scaled based on the likelihood of punishment?
> NNT's tend to be pretty high for most medical interventions. e.g. statins.
I would not pay 30% of my salary for statins.
> We pay a small percentage of our income to what becomes city budgets
All of the money that cities use to purchase police service comes from taxes. The question is not what percentage of an individual's income goes to police, but whether, from the perspective of the city, the overall allocation is an effective use of public funds.
No, but they should be.
> I would not pay 30% of my salary for statins.
Do you pay 30% of your salary for policing?
> The question is not what percentage of an individual's income goes to police, but whether, from the perspective of the city, the overall allocation is an effective use of public funds.
That's an.. ahem.. interesting way to look at it. So if the city wastes twice as much money elsewhere, policing becomes a better deal?
Or if the city gets 30 pennies, and uses 33% of it to stop a fraction of crime, that's a bad deal?
It might be better to look at the services that residents receive in exchange for the amount they pay in taxes, instead of using some ridiculous metric based on fraction of one political entity's tax income.
Otherwise we come up with ridiculous silly comparisons. The sheriff is a tiny proportion of my county's expenditures, and police are a big proportion of my city's expenditures... by your metric, the sheriff is more cost effective, despite costing nearly the exact same amount per capita for the people they're first responders for. (Because the county gets a much bigger share of tax income and spends a bunch on other services that my city doesn't have to pay for).
Or if we're going with the health analogy-- we spend the overwhelming majority of our public health "income" on things with very high NNTs.
"Effective" to me means "achieves desired outcome". You seem to be using a different definition.
If a city represents the interests of its residents and the residents share an interest in material safety, then the question becomes: which strategies provide the residents as a whole with the most safety for the least expenditure? And which strategies are the most in harmony with the resident's other interests (e.g., equality, human dignity)?
For a given outcome: it's the same deal whether the city spends 33% on policing and it's 100x dollars, or if it spends 33% on policing and it's 1x dollars? Surely the proportion of residents' money spent on policing is what matters.
> "Effective" to me means "achieves desired outcome". You seem to be using a different definition.
Basically nothing achieves desired outcome. Case clearance rates are hardly a figure of merit for policing: I think it's likely that you believe as such, too. Or do you think the system would be better if it threw more people in jail?
Argue in good faith. There's plenty of an argument for different police policy without going through ridiculous gymnastics ("percentage of income", arguing low case clearance rates makes policing ineffective, etc). Otherwise, you end up losing the people who might mostly agree with you-- maybe on purpose, are you just trolling?
Similarly, most fines don't scale with wealth. So a speeding ticket might be a terrible blow for an impoverished individual, but completely inconsequential for the super rich.
Regarding what United States cities spend on police, Mother Jones has some information here: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/08/the-blue-b...
Honestly, the numbers are surprising to me. Example: Normally, New York City is quoted as having the largest police force in the United States. However, NYC only spends 8% of its city budget on police. I lived in Manhattan for a few years, and it was normal to see police on foot/bike/car patrols even in wealthy, relatively crime-free neighborhoods.
Also: In the Mother Jones article pie charts, Oakland spends 44% of its city budget on police. But in the historical graphs below, they spend about 8%. There must be a subtle difference in what they are measuring, but it is unclear to me.
According to that list police budgets make up an average of 30% of overall spending.
But pension obligations are a pretty significant component of the price of policing, so excluding them in these calculations doesn't make a lot of sense.
20%-30% is pretty typical. Almost all cities with lower numbers have enormous transportation budgets (e.g., NYC -- they do spend a ton on police, but they also have transportation budget that's comparable to many states).
If someone picks your pocket, that’s theft. If someone steals something from your house while you’re at work, that’s burglary.
Had my bike stolen DIRECTLY in front of a security camera in Seattle.
The police didn't even bother to look for the plates on the car in the footage identify the person. They also wouldn't let me see the tape. They just showed up and said, "This is a cold case" and then left.
I guess the illusion of them showing up gave me some sense of validation.
People committing property crimes will trip themselves up and get caught eventually, even if the probability of any individual case being solved is low.
Second, as I understand burglary, it is a property crime, like breaking & entering into a home, business, or car. Robbery is person-to-person theft (stick-up by knife, gun, etc.) If we think about burglary for a moment, most burglaries happen when no one is around. Thus, imagine how difficult it is to have enough evidence to even lay a charge against someone. Vanishingly small. I'm not sure that is a good way to judge the effectiveness of police. I lived in an apartment building many years ago where someone got to the roof, then entered an open window and stole some things. The chances of catching this person are incredibly low. The police came to our building to ask questions and look at the inside of various apartments. The effort was made, but it would be nearly impossible to lay charges with so little tangible evidence.
Third, think about robbery. When I think about robbery, I think about "wrong place, wrong time" -- on a street alone at night. What are the chances the police will be able to gather enough evidence to lay a charge? Again, vanishingly small.
Lastly, about this clearance rate for these two crime categories: How does it compare to other high income countries like Canada, UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, etc.? I'm sure it is also fairly low.
The point is that we should take the massive amount of funding that police receive in the US ($5.1 billion of which has gone towards military vehicles and equipment through the DOD 1033 program) and reallocate it to strategies which extend to people other options beyond a cycle of crime and punishment.
See, e.g. here I'd agree with you totally: almost the entirety of that money spent on the militarization of police is worthless, or, worse, actively harmful. You don't need to make bullshit arguments to support it. Indeed, you weaken people's perceptions of the strength of the case when you give them bullshit arguments.
And the average clearance rate for murder is around 60.
Given that police prioritize some crimes over others, one should be careful in using the stats for things they don't place a priority on as a basis to pass judgement. If the violent crime rate could be lowered for example, say by removing the ability of a violent gang to operate (i.e., arrest and convict them), this frees up time to go after other crimes. We are looking at the current equilibrium achieved as a result of all their efforts, not some law of nature that happens either way (i.e. fixed clearance rates).
> Camden and Newark, two cities in New Jersey, are among those that have been held up as powerful examples of positive change. The two cities have seen structural reforms to their police departments and a steep drop in crime, both within the communities and inflicted by the police.
Clearly it was an effective structural reform. But it does not constitute "police abolition" in a way that would be meaningful to police abolitionists.
And Newark didn't even do that. They just started actually investigating police abuses and imposing actual consequences for abuse.
If anything, it goes to show that you don't need police abolition to make an improvement. But you do need to make changes that amount to more than lip service.
Ref: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...
Please provide a source for this. No need to rewrite history. I believe most historians agree that American policing was based off of the London policing system:
“The first police department in the United States was established in New York City in 1844 (it was officially organized in 1845). Other cities soon followed suit: New Orleans and Cincinnati (Ohio) in 1852; Boston and Philadelphia in 1854; Chicago and Milwaukee (Wis.) in 1855; and Baltimore (Md.) and Newark (N.J.) in 1857. Those early departments all used the London Metropolitan Police as a model.”
If anything poor neighborhoods that have high crime need more police not less, there’s a reason Chicago and Detroit have problems and it’s not because of overpolicing.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Early-police-in-the-...
The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”
In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.
From Wikipedia [2]:
For approximately 150 years, union organizing efforts and strikes have been periodically opposed by police, security forces, National Guard units, special police forces such as the Coal and Iron Police, and/or use of the United States Army. Significant incidents have included the Haymarket Riot and the Ludlow massacre. The Homestead struggle of 1892, the Pullman walkout of 1894, and the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903 are examples of unions destroyed or significantly damaged by the deployment of military force. In all three examples, a strike became the triggering event.
These aren't the only influences on modern policing in the US, but it's hard to argue that the history of US policing isn't deeply intertwined with slave patrols, union busting efforts, and more generally protecting the interests of the ruling class.
[1] - https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...
Somewhat independently the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 created an income stream for groups to capture escaped slaves and return them to the south. Critically, southerners needed to fund these activities. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 swapped this by requiring northern states to actively capture escaped slaves. It essentially mandated large scale institutions of government backed policing.
The south had a separate but related system of slave patrols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_patrol Interestingly at the same time the north was required to hunt for escaped slaves a trade patrol was actively suppressing the African slave trade going back to 1891.
Anyway, this stuff is may be relevant in terms of the history of specific institutions, but it’s arguable how relevant this is in a modern context.
https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-...
Nearly ten years ago, Reason posted a comparison of police recruitment videos from Decatur, Georgia, and Newport Beach, California. They illustrate beautifully the two mindsets you describe.
https://reason.com/2012/07/06/voting-with-your-feet-police-e...
The videos don't play on that page any more, so here are direct links.
Decatur: https://www.youtube.com/watch/cIgt8pmh7CU
Newport Beach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_rKA6ROAVk
Most of us do not consider apprehension of violent criminals to be a “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.
This is true.
> And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons.
This is false.
> 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.
This is a leftist talking point that is designed to avoid recognizing that abuse of authority is not a consequence of a specific country’s troubled history but a consequence of the existence of authority. They do this because they can, not because some oligarch somewhere wants them to.
> 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.
It doesn’t happen because the ability to hold the police accountable is the same as the ability of the police to hold members of society accountable, i.e. coercion. And coercion always begets abuse. So your institution that holds the police accountable becomes the one who is responsible for people getting beat to death, etc, and the cycle continues because we can’t seem to come to terms with the idea that society shouldn’t recognize norms of differential status.
> 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.
You’re never going to make any progress on this because you’re wrong about this being the desired outcome, and so any solution based on this premise is flawed.
That said, if you re-read your post from the perspective of someone living in Scotland, UK, it won't have the same impact. In theory, your thoughts should equally apply in the UK, but UK residents would probably disagree. I don't live in the UK, but I have some friends from various parts of the UK. There is such a different attitude about the police in the UK. Yes, they make mistakes, and there are a few bad apples. However, overall, there is respect. One of the key points is "police by consent". If you don't know about this concept in UK policing, I strongly recommend you Google a bit to read about it. Basically: The attitude of police is that they need to tread lightly in a community because they "police by consent". I know HN has many UK readers, so I would appreciate some comments about this!
A deeper question to ask might be: Why have some US police forces descended so much (so little public trust) versus other police forces in the UK? In particular, from my non-resident view, it seems Scotland police have a very strong, if imperfect, relationship with their communities. What could US police forces learn from their UK counterparts? A few years ago, a New York Times journalist followed some US police who traveled to Scotland. They observed how the local police were trained and how they behaved during patrols and arrests. In short: Very differently!
On a positive note: It is also worth looking at the Los Angeles police department. In the 1990s, it was one of the worst in the United States for community trust and police violence. After the Rodney King incident and riots that followed, there was a huge effort to "clean-up" the police force. The police leaders actively sought to rebuild ties with community and religious leaders. I have read multiple news and magazine articles about this relationship. When something bad happens in LA that might trigger inter-ethnic/religious tension, the LA police immediately reach-out to community leaders. They have public and private meetings to discuss the issue. My point: The community has a voice and feels heard. Yes, it is not perfect, but it demonstrates that real change is possible.
Some police officers want to maintain a safe and secure neighborhood, others just like having power and want to engage in military cosplay but real.
The police departments that maintain an effective community rapport are also going to be the ones that actively spend budgeted time and money weeding out the second class of cop. If you aren't vigilant about it, your PD will be chock full of the military cosplay types. Why? Well, a lot of the latter types are... well, I'm not going to say the nickname, since it's quite offensive in the UK (less so in the US). But they will often bounce from PD to PD. Once they wind up getting on the wrong end of an internal affairs investigation, they'll usually just resign to avoid punishment, move to another town, and sign up there. There's plenty of underfunded PDs that really aren't going to stick their nose up at bad cops.
My experience showed me some of the horrendous things they have to deal with. There’s some genuinely dangerous people out there - I can’t imagine living somewhere without armed resistance to deal with it.
With that said it’s critical officers form a relationship with the community they’re policing. That’s what good policing is and unfortunately the drug war has made it difficult.
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.
Disbanding the Iraqi military was a very interesting event but the militia-like groups coming out of that action is more an issue of ceasing pay to folks with no other options in a pretty dysfunctional economy than anything else.
In this situation there would be more armed citizens than disgruntled ex-cops so the problem should take care of itself in short order.
The issue isn't that the police are radicalized and disgruntled. It's that they have the budgetary and legal resources to operate with impunity. Take that away and they're just a gang. Other gangs will eat them for lunch.
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...
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).
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.
His YouTube channel is full of interesting examples of manufactured content. For example, he has videos of feeding expired meters after "meter maids" have already seen the meter, then arguing with them; filing multiple complaints at police stations; and refusing to take DUI tests at checkpoints.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzSRcnANzs5BourVavBoe9A
He also sells daily lists of DUI checkpoints.
https://mrcheckpoint.com/alerts/checkpoints/
I'm absolutely in favor of holding bad cops accountable, but he doesn't seem to be targeting bad cops, just whatever cop is unlucky enough to be assigned to the area where he's working that day.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.