The real problem here is that there is no consequence for incorrect takedowns. If content is taken down and then it turns out to be fair use, no one suffers a penalty.
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.
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.
I think #2 is probably too high for private citizens to risk needing to pay if their claims are reversed. Individuals can and do exercise DMCA notices for protected content that they personally own and if that route for reconciliation would be taken away and alternative would need to be provided.
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.
> I think #2 is probably too high for private citizens to risk needing to pay if their claims are reversed.
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.
Just fix the root problem. Copyright should last fifteen years max. The system now just incentivizes companies to hoard old stuff and eschew making risky new stuff.
15 years may be too short for some content. I'm ok with indefinite copyright, but there should be a steep price. Like the owner of the copyright pays X% of their revenue from that copyright back to the treasury each year, where X is the number of years it's been copyrighted.
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.
I think an even more simple and self limiting solution would be to require a payment for copyright that doubles every period.
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.
This can be easily gamed with some creative accounting.
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.
The point of copyright is to offer a limited monopoly to encourage making risky things. If you can't or don't want to monetize it, then you don't need the monopoly, and it's unlikely that such a scheme would stifle innovation.
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".
So start the clock after a (small) number of initial years. And/or make it free until publication (so e.g. making the rounds with publishers doesn't require you to start paying). Or tweak the exponents.
It seems pretty complicated to strike a balance this way, in comparison to simple time-based methods. And there's basically no reason not to keep paying the fees up to 80 or 90 years under your scheme.
If you want more renewals to avoid orphan works, I'd just add more renewals. They don't need to cost much.
I want renewals to avoid abandonment and I also want most copyrights to expire quickly. I think a fee structure could be found that gets most copyrights to expire quickly without discouraging innovation.
I don't think it's good to make smaller holders' copyright expire more quickly than bigger holders'.
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.
>longer copyright is going to disproportionately be on big works owned by big holders
... 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.)
"Mickey Mouse" isn't copyrighted, it's trademarked. There is, I believe, pretty wide consensus that trademarks remain valid as long as they're in use.
"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.
You seem to misunderstand how copyright works. Registration is not required and there is no comprehensive registry of everything copyrighted. Copyrights are created upon creation of the work and inure to the author. Registration merely grants the author certain benefits (e.g., a right to pursue statutory damages against infringers).
> 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.
I'm actually very aware of how copyright works. I know there is no registration. That's a huge problem, as it leads to abandoned works. I want to change the system to require registration.
> 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.
This would be a plagiarists manifesto. Just because I can't afford to copyright everything I write, that doesn't mean it's ok for anyone else to just take it. Also, what happens if i intend to copyright it when it's finished, but someone gets hold of a copy and publishes it before I'm ready? Some authors can take decades to develop a project. What you're advocating is a poorly thought out recipe for publishers to systematically rip off artists.
Creating something without the intention of making money is different from creating something without the prospect of making money. The former is already covered by the likes of Creative Commons licensing or just not enforcing copyright.
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?
> 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 is not meant to protect your profits. It's meant to encourage creative risk taking.
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.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Processing registrations and maintaining a registry has significant costs. In 2019, the US Copyright Office made 547,837 registrations and received about $35 million in total fees. [0] In 2019, the Registrar of Copyrights asked Congress for a budget of $92.9 million. [1]
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.
This is the worst part of this whole copyright mess, defenders of youtube constantly preach the "They have to do this", "they are forced to do this" etc. defense.
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).
And being live streamed without consent is the right way?
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.
Not an US citizen but the issue with police is that for a start in every country that I know of, they are not your equal law-abiding citizen when wearing a uniform. Most of the time, they have law tools allowing them to arrest, fine you, etc. if they feel threaten, being at risk or insulted and only by their own appreciation. Nobody will review their appreciation and to contest such case, it fail on you side to make all the necessary steps to contest (best case scenario if you don't end up dead on the street).
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.
They have the same ability/powers in my country and it virtually never happens. To my mind, there's a problem with how US citizens view police officers, an how US police officers view US citizens.
Care to elaborate on this? I am a US citizen, and I find it hard to understand the implication that US citizens are responsible for the violence and aggressive tactics of police.
Not the GP, but my personal impression is that US culture glorifies violence and conflict, as conflict, rather than co-operation, is seen as a way to get ahead on an individual level. That spreads through all layers of society including law enforcement.
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.
For the most part this isn't true. The difference is that Americans are more willing to express themselves on these topics than people in some European countries. And I say this as an American who's been living in Europe for over 12 years now.
I guess? But that's a fairly huge generalization to portray a whole country, isn't it? And even it were true to such a degree that it influenced policing, that does't really address the concerns of disproportionate use of violence towards people of color, or repeated instances of corruption and illegal tactics.
In my view, the US citizens are too polarized in almost any category to work their issues with one another. Most have very limited capacity for compromise and it's not always limited by internal rationalization. You are either left or right, cop or a citizen, black or caucasian, etc. God forbid you say the word "social" if you are a republican or you'll be labelled as a traitor to your party, that kind of polarization. There is no middle ground with where you stand. There was an interview on Ben Shapiro's channel on youtube where people on the street which identify as liberal where asked if they would consider compromising in order to get along with the right. They said, "Yes, we must be united." However when they were asked to choose on some policies to compromise, they disagreed to do so on every single one of them. Obviously this was targeted interview and I don't agree with half of the things that Shapiro is saying. However for citizens to live in peace with the rest there must be some kind of process of discussions and resolutions through compromise. And in your case those usually start with a discussion and end up with "f* you", "no f* you". My theory is that you have not had enough experience with negotiations and that is attributed to the limited foreign encounters that you had in your history. In Europe we had so many conflicts and wars that we had to negotiate all the time to keep the status quo which meant sometimes compromising with the opposition. The US way to handle things is usually to go straight to the active and aggressive approach. I've seen this in my business meetings and IT meetings with US clients. In itself this way of handling things is neither correct nor wrong, however it must be applied only when it is suitable to do so. And in my opinion this is usually all that you have in your deck of cards. I have some other theories as well on why your social approach is usually more aggressive.
The is a problem with the power structures, not the people. American hierarchies give power to people who glorify those things, and those people exercise that power to prevent or suppress the spread of opposing ideas.
This does not excuse or allow the frequent and extreme violence that is perpetrated by police on unarmed citizens, which is the reason they feel the need to document their experiences with officers.
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. "
The problem is that when you don't know if a citizen is armed or not, you just default to thinking they are. Because that is the safer assumption for you to make as a police officer. If citizens are not allowed to carry guns, that default assumption changes. It is a whole different dynamic.
> If citizens are not allowed to carry guns, that default assumption changes.
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.
I find your distinction between law abiding citizens and criminals hilarious.
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...
It's not way more complicated. Get rid of the guns, and you will get rid of a lot of problems. It is really that simple.
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.
If it was likely the other person has a gun, I would think twice before doing something. It makes more sense to me to be more wary when I assume that the person I may be thinking of robbing has a gun on them, vs. knowing it is extremely unlikely that the person is not going to have a gun on them.
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 |
I would be careful with this information, because correlation != causation, as well as the fact that cause and effect might be reversed. And to be fair to the HICRC, they don't claim the causation.
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".
The problem is, even if people buy guns to feel safer, it doesn't help. (It simply makes crime more violent. Guns don't deter crime.)
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.
The thought that someone may have a gun may deter though. How effective is it? I do not know. If it is known that in my area most people carry a gun, then people may think twice to rob. Emphasis on may, because I do not know how effective it is at all.
Crime is motivated by opportunity (eg. if there's virtually no enforcement) and necessity. By the time someone gets to the point of committing violent crimes, armed or not doesn't really matter. (At least this is how I understand it.)
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.
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" as they say. Serbia and Honduras are anomalies. Within the entire data set there's a significant positive correlation between "Guns per 100 inhabitants" and Homicide rate.
Are they anomalies, too, or what do you mean by anomaly? I do not want to edit the table anymore, but someone also mentioned Switzerland, indeed, extremely low rate of firearm-related homicide (0.13) with high rate of gun ownership (27.6-41.2). There are many more.
The obvious answer to this is firearms. I'm amazed at how little this is appreciated in terms of the extra stress for US police officers. US police officers are a completely different profession to every other country.
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.
There is a good argument too that police should not handle good chunk of social situations that are not violent or criminal. Steer the system so that social workers without ability to use force handle them first and escalate to police as necessary.
How about we keep their budgets the same, and force them to use 20% of that budget for training? They can reduce their expenditures on tear gas and rubber bullets and harassment campaigns against activists and Black people.
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.
> And being live streamed without consent is the right 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.
How can they be held accountable if people can't record what they do?
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?
But you dont have a right to everyone else's business. Police frequently deal with people in their worst, and yet some feel so entitled to seeing these situations they have nothing to do with as though it were just a drama on Netflix.
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.
I agree that this is a problem, and it could be solved by a legal requirement - spreading of the material is illegal if it is done for degrading the subject of police action, and "traffickers" (i.e. "laugh of the day" video aggregators) are held liable for redistributing such content.
Not arguing against holding public law enformcement accountable, but in a society where everyone sues everyone at the drop of a hat it's very easy to do something reasonable in the context that nevertheless opens you up for potentially expensive legal consequences. I can understand why people get jumpy when they are being filmed, even if they aren't doing anything obviously wrong.
I'm torn on the idea of body cams. On the one hand, there really needs to be more transparency in public service. On the other hand, no one wants their boss looking over their shoulder all day. I know I wouldn't take that 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.
What you've described is largely how the DMCA already works.
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.
I know how the DMCA works. The problem is step 2. Step two should be "platform notifies possible violator that claim has been made". The platform should not be punished for leaving the content up. Right now, under the DMCA, if they leave the content up, they become liable. That should not be the case.
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.
This is not about the laws.
YouTube has their own copyright processes that are more stringent than DMCA. They allow companies to automate take down and take over requests with no repercussions. Everyone who shares a video to their platform has agreed to this process.
I'm aware of that, but the reason YouTube has that process is because they don't want to get sued. If the law gave YouTube immunity by simply reporting copyright claims instead of taking them down, they would switch their process. Especially if YouTube had a penalty for getting it wrong.
> I'm aware of that, but the reason YouTube has that process is because they don't want to get sued. If the law gave YouTube immunity by simply reporting copyright claims instead of taking them down, they would switch their process.
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.
There's already a "under penalty of perjury" in the DMCA for rightsholders. Though it's arguable whether it has been ineffective; most settle out of court before it gets that far.
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.
(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.
> There's already a "under penalty of perjury" in the DMCA for rightsholders. Though it's arguable whether it has been ineffective; most settle out of court before it gets that far.
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.
The problem is that the only thing the claimant is saying under penalty of perjury as that they are actually the rightsholder (or are authorized to act on their behalf), and they have a good-faith belief that their takedown reasoning is correct. Since it's essentially impossible to prove lack of a "belief", no one ever gets in trouble for filing a false or weak claim.
> There's already a "under penalty of perjury" in the DMCA for rightsholders.
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.
But that is exactly jedberg's point: To get them to stop doing this, there needs to be regulation that ensures that if you invent alternative systems like this, you get penalised if you wrongly take content down.
> 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.
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.
Not even: a machine could likely handle the entire interaction, pretty trivially. DMCA notices are pretty close to form letters. In the rare occasion it can't grok the notice, it could be flagged for human review.
They might have nonstandard contracts with big media producers that prevent YT from removing ContentID and/or require YT to grant special takedown powers, so any legal change would have to address those types of contracts (if they exist) as well.
Yes I know, which is why the law should be changed to make this extrajudicial process illegal and expensive for YouTube, so that their most prudent course of action is to notify the copyright holder and then do nothing.
A proposal which amounts to making it 'illegal and expensive' for an internet platform to do any kind of moderation other than the process mandated by US copyright law sounds like a far more grotesque imposition on the internet than anything the most aggressive copyright lawyers have proposed.
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.
I have to disagree. Making the platform completely indemnified if they take no action and putting all the responsibility on the rights holders would be great for the internet. It would suck for the rights holders, but I'm ok with that, and I think most people would be.
I think a fair solution would be "Should your content be taken down by the ContentID system/outside the DMCA, you should be able to protest and require a DMCA claim", i.e. "I stand by the righteousness of my denial and want to invoke the legal process to defend it".
That's one of the problems, and I agree with your idea. It would be vastly better to put the burden of claiming the copyright on the holder, as they are the party who benefits from that action.
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.
> The real problem here is that there is no consequence for incorrect takedowns. If content is taken down and then it turns out to be fair use, no one suffers a penalty.
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."
"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."
> Let the platforms be neutral, put the liability on the copyright violators and copyright holders equally, so both have a reason to act fairly.
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.
IANAL, but there are penalties for filing a false DMCA notice already. Almost never happens, but it exists.
> 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.
By encouraging the use of non-DMCA notices by providing increased ability, above and beyond the DMCA, to take content down, they reduce the legal risk of not properly handling a DMCA notice simply by getting fewer actual DMCA notices.
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.
The main thing that makes them use the current system is the liability they could incur by not doing it. And because it's cheaper than processing all the DMCA claims.
If they were indemnified by law and even worse liable for penalties if they keep the current system, then they would quickly change it.
But if all copyrights required registration, then all the notices would have to go along with that registration. You'd have to commit identity theft, which is a separate crime that you would be prosecuted for.
A solution is to require that the DMCA notice contains proof of ownership of the copyright (or proof that you are acting as an agent of the verified copyright holder).
Amateur analysis: for the citizens filming, yes. The copying is incidental, does not harm the market for the work, and the filming is for news/informational purposes.
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.
No, the real problem is the cops know what they are doing is an attempt to circumvent the spirit if not the letter of the law and they need to be punished.
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
Really? Copyright law is the real problem and not the extrajudicial murder of citizens by police? Must be nice to be insulated from worrying about that.
>Documenting police activities with video is a good way to improve accountability.
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.
You can’t seriously be suggesting that the ability to record video with cellphones that even the homeless now own and upload it to be viewed globally by millions in real-time has existed for 30 years.
"Documenting police activities with video is a good way to improve accountability. "
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.
So, the police in these instances are breaching copyright, specifically "performance rights", which prohibit the public playing of music outside of a circle of family and friends, unless they have received permission from the copyright holders.
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.
What's preventing them from making their own tune, put it on cdbaby or whatever it was to get it into the content id system, and then issue copyright takedowns?
But AFAIK it's primarily up to the copyright holder to decide if it is fair use or not. From YouTube's help page[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.
That's a stretch. The purpose of that law was to prevent public unlicensed public performances, such as playing a song over a public address system to a crowd at a park, not someone listening to their personal cell phone at normal volumes.
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.
Not a stretch, considering this is their intent. See in particular the 2nd point from 17 U.S. Code § 101 - Definitions
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.
The purpose is to prevent revenue loss by the recording company who could host their own public event (or selling rights thereof). It would be an impossible argument to make that the police (or anyone) playing a song on their phone is reducing the ability of the record company from gaining revenues from hosting their own local event.
Well, that is the difference between the rule of law (there are tribunals for deciding whether the police are breaking the law or not) and the rule of incorporated companies: you are screwed if they decide it...
The author of the first public drinking law, in 1979, said on the law's purpose:
>"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.
They are pointing out that the codified law is applicable, not what you claim was the original purpose.
(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.)
It's not really about the purpose - it's about the rights. And it's rights in the plural - not just right to revenue - but also the exclusive right to public performance.
Next time, bring an RIAA lawyer to any cop encounter...
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...
Enforcing copyright against this at best seems like a stop-gap solution. Next they'll legally play the official police union song and use the DMCA against people recording and sharing that.
Filming them breaching copyright as evidence of their breaching copyright is the solution. Send to copyright troll lawyers and the various RIAA hangers on that attempt to prosecute these breaches.
? The filming and distribution of someone listening to music is literally the breach of copyright, not anything the cop is doing, i.e. playing music to himself, which is obviously legal in every sense.
> Playing music to yourself is not a 'public performance'.
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?
Goes to show why the cop wouldnt like to be recorded. Ridiculous people who would freak out if a police officer bothered them for listening to music are now their own worst enemies.
No, the police are not breaching copyright by playing music, it's very obviously the person doing the filming and posting to public channels that is breaking copyright if anything is being broken.
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?
No copyright broken if the music is filtered out prior to upload to a public platform.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
"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.
It's a rational inference if you read what the definition of a public performance is.
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.
Considering the police officer is on duty and inside the precinct - which is aimed at serving the public, I wouldn't consider this "playing music to yourself".
Otherwise, every employee in bars and restaurants could "play music to themselves", without paying anything and without infringing copyrights ?
Just another of the myriad examples of how the DMCA is abused with no repercussions to the abusers at all.
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.
I am amazed I am going to say this, but the issue is not with the DMCA but with Google/YouTube allowing a bypass of DMCA.
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).
I think what you say is technically true (technically speaking in the cited case the issue is indeed with the Content ID system), but the broader issue is absolutely with the DMCA because the whole reason Google/Youtube implemented Content ID is to cut down on the number of actual DMCA requests they receive. In other words, without DMCA there would very likely be no Content ID.
Bypassing the DMCA doesn’t make life harder for owners of publishing rights. It makes life easier and I assume is a consequence of a negotiation with major publishers.
Large businesses do not generally seek to enforce their rights against the police as the police are responsible for breaking the law to keep those businesses humming away.
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.
Time for a technology company to come in to create a service that emits some form of A/V and trigger DRM enforcement procedures. Imagine when sporting events start to implement this to jam social media sharing.
So what happens if the person filming starts playing a different song? I don't imagine the filter would be smart enough to make out the two different songs playing at the same time?
Do you mean that law enforcement can get away with breaking the law, or do you mean that the law permits law enforcement to break the law? Either way, your comment seems overbroad and comes across as uselessly snarky.
The law permits law enforcement to break laws (e.g., buying or selling drugs) if it serves a legitimate law enforcement purpose. Breaking copyright law would almost certainly be covered.
I am 100% for accountability in policing, but I find it telling the number of these kinds of videos that don't show the full context and are instead 30s clips of the middle/worst part of the interaction.
What is the point of this comment if you don't back it with receipts? The videos are available, you could make the effort to find out but chose to post this instead.
The 30 second clip is to provoke outrage and I guess clicks; the full recording is evidence in a court of law. DMCA will not apply then.
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.
I feel like if you know the song being played (which could also be automatically identified with an algorithm like shazam's) it would be pretty easy to generate an inverse waveform to remove it from a video's audio. It wouldn't be perfect, obviously, but it should screw up the song enough to not set off the copyright filter while leaving the conversation intelligible.
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.
Simply playing a song "in the background" without any critique, educational purpose, or other transformative fair use is almost certainly an performance of the original work. If the cop doesn't have an appropriate license, they could be liable for statutory damages up to $150,000[1] per work.
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
If I were an artist and learned that my work had been used in this manner, I would be outraged and would absolutely want to pursue damages for the unauthorized public performance, or demand that my record label pursue damages.
I wonder how the members of Sublime feel about this.
The lead singer died decades ago, but I think it is still very clear what the band would think: the lyrics of one of their songs are about very similar issues:
Wouldn't you have to be a party to the infringing work for that to be true? Presumably you can sue the copyright holder of the film and not the "actors" as it were?
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.
There are two separate potential copyright issues here: The public performance, and the recording. The cop was the one responsible for the public performance.
I think the idea is not to get hit with a "public performance" charge, but to have the video get automatically taken down on Youtube/Twitch/Instagram once it gets uploaded (due to the algorithm detecting copyright-infringing material).
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".
You can try. I'm sure the cops will just start playing songs by artists who approve of cops playing but don't approve of the songs appearing in the background of social media posts.
Depends on who holds the rights. Whoever holds them decides on the permissions.
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.
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
Slightly related, but the only way I was able to get a site taken down for a fraudulent listing of my rental property was to file a Trademark/Copyright claim on the photos and description. The fact that had my property with them listed as the owner and their own phone number was not enough.
If only we paid artists from a generous public support of the arts instead of making them scrimp and appeal to rich people or get pennies from individual streamers we could do away with copyright and such filters completely.
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.
There is nothing bad with them having to work hard to make money.
The offer for music is incredibly high and most people would prefer playing music over doing their job. The market is oversaturated and it gets worse and worse the more time passes (assuming a portion of people will be content with music from the past). It's normal that making music pays penny.
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.
Given our lopsided wealth distribution, why don't we redistribute and make our musicians more well to do? Another tax is really a great idea, it wouldn't solve everything but would help make a more equal society if it could be applied without corporations avoiding it.
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.
When the Beetles were forming, they lived off the dole in the UK. The dole is credited with creating the music culture of the UK back in the 60s.
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.
> they lived off the dole in the UK. The dole is credited with creating
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 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.
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.
As I stated in another comment, higher pay would be reserved for people recognized as practicing musicians by their peers. They could also earn money via performances like they do now, but they would be guaranteed a standard of living so long as they stayed current. For example, playing for free in a coffee shop, publishing videos on YouTube, producing sheet music, logging hours of practice etc would count towards currency.
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.
How do you get recognized by practicing musicians? Could I generate white noise and pay them a cut of my future government hand outs so they would approve my white noise as music?
Like honestly this idea is so amazingly terrible and full of an infinite number of holes I'm surprised anyone is arguing for it.
This is essentially how science grants work. The state awards some money for science in general and allots it to a few agencies to distribute, who then use practicing scientists to figure out who deserves it. How does anyone determine whom is a practitioner of a given art? It's some interplay between demonstrated objective skill and practitioner consensus.
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.
The think the government paying artists directly would solve problems? It would create tons of problems and just end up as another broken system like everything else.
The market breaks the government and then we blame the government so we'll cede more power to the market is another interpretation. Another interpretation is that the American government was designed to cater to elites from inception and one day we will fully democratize it and make it work for all of us.
Why is it not possible for individuals to just pay a fee like a radio station to not get copyright striked?
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.
Some media in some jurisdictions have compulsory licensing, but music recordings in the USA do not. Licenses are discretionary. I.e. must be negotiated from the owner.
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.
> Why is it not possible for individuals to just pay a fee like a radio station to not get copyright striked?
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."
Ugh, this isn't funny in the least bit, and it's just an extension of this apathy towards our society and the other people in it. This is an extreme version of people lying about their pet's support animal status.
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?
I guess at some point platforms will stop removing media that contains copyrighted audio, and instead just remove the copyrighted audio from the media. (?)
It should be possible to remove the music while retaining the rest of the audio. It will be a little bit more complicated than just subtracting a known waveform because of imperfect speakers and mics, but I suspect it's still possible.
Youtube already does or did this. I remember multiple videos that had no audio and a notification that the audio has been removed owing to a copyright complaint.
There was a time when they did that.
I had a video with music from The Doors and people talking over. They removed the song and you could still hear the distorted voices
It's theoretically straightforward if you have the actual copyrighted audio; you can just invert it and add it to the audio stream.
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.
Thought experiment: Would such a use of the original music as anti-music count as a transformative work of the original song (not the video, where it definitely would) under copyright?
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.
If human beings can tell the difference between speech and background audio while both are playing simultaneously, it has to be possible somehow for a machine to do it.
Deezer's library Spleeter seems to do quite a good job at separating out various instruments from a raw recording with fairly low phase smearing. I could see that kind of technology could be adapted to this use case not because it's right or wrong, but because there's an incentive for the platform to leave the content up and able to be monetized rather than 86'd entirely.
Given that copyrighted audio is- more or less by definition- available as a separate track without interference, it shouldn't be too difficult to subtract it from the video's track.
The uploaders- or tech-savvy early downloaders- might be able to do the same. So as a way to prevent videos from being uploaded to social media seems completely lame. As this video proves, it's just a ticket for becoming quickly a very famous asshole.
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.
Just a side note, but automatic removal of music would be a good application for AI based DSP processing. There are already companies offering VSTs and hardware for the removal of street noise, dogs barking, etc., but I'm not aware of products for removing background music.
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 think a better approach to outright blocking the infringing, or presume to be infringing content, would be developing software that identifies the infringing audio and removes it using sound cancellation. This would require the claimant to submit a sample of the infringed content and an algorithm to add a layer of opposite polarity audio or alteration of the actual original layer.
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.
Regardless of legality i find it very rude to have someone I am speaking to all of a sudden turn on loud music. I think there is room to post a behavior complaint against the officers who do this.
Fuck that's genius. It's still admissible in court, but cannot be used for "views" on Instagram and social media. Absolutely video tape officers, but the video can only be used for evidence, not for views. Show it to lawyers, not social media. Let the court case results get the views, not the video!
What would constitute an "inappropriate takedown"? Just one month ago the popular opinion seemed to be that there is no such thing. Even if the content is benign, it's private companies making private decisions - completely within their right. What's changed, in so little time?
I believe that under copyright law playing music in this manner constitutes a "public performance" which, unless explicitly authorized by the copyright holder, is a copyright infringement by the officer. Couldn't this backfire with copyright cases against the police?
With a known song identified, is it feasible for YouTube to silence (subtract) only that song from the audio of recorded video? Seems like that would be within the realm of similar actions they take to blur faces and license plates in streetview images.
Given the original source song, I would think it should be possible to make some software to strip the song from a video while leaving behind the other sounds no? Maybe using some sort of correlation function or something?
I have empathy for not wanting to be filmed, but then why be a member serving the public if this is the case? There is zero expectation of privacy if I’m performing an act in public on the government’s dime.
This is just a suggestion and I am not a lawyer and this is probably in the gray area and a bad idea, but one could upload the videos their own site (server) then embed links to the files on your social media platforms. Each platform could censor your post, but the video would remain. If you are truly violating copyrights, then you could of course lose your domain or face legal repercussions, but if this is a case of a bot being overly aggressive, then it might avoid the problem. The only reason I could see hosting a video on platforms like Youtube would be if you wanted to monetize it or expected a significantly large number of simultaneous viewers. Even then, you can downsize/optimize it for mobile viewers and then link to a full size version for media outlets to use.
DMCA is ironically fairer towards end users and actually recognizes fair use and provides avenues to appeal. YT is draconian and unfair by comparison and fair use doesn't exist to them.
That was one points I called out. If this is really a copyright holder sending notifications, then yes you could lose your domain. I suspect that is not what is happening though. I suspect these are bots that detect what music is in a video and automatically pull it down. It might be people clicking a button to "report" a video and then the bot listens to it. Well, the bots can't do that if the file is not under their control. But yes, you could lose your domain or worse if you are in fact intentionally violating copyrights.
If this happens, the artist or record label should sue the police for publicly performing musical compositions and sound recordings without permission!
automated "copyright enforcement" mechanisms don't make that distinction, and appeals against them have the same success rate you can expect against any other big-tech automated moderation - not good.
NVIDIA has ML-based noise suppression functionality in the form of RTX Voice.
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):
Why do people still put things on services which follow takedown requests? It's kind of silly to rely on these gigantic oppressive corporations to get your message out when we have, say Bittorrent over i2p which is practically censorship proof.
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.
> Why do people still put things on services which follow takedown requests? It's kind of silly to rely on these gigantic oppressive corporations to get your message out when we have, say Bittorrent over i2p which is practically censorship proof.
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.
Every big service has to honor DMCA takedown requests. In fact, every service in the US needs to honor them lest they want to become a party in a lawsuit for copyright infringement.
Most of them are far more aggressive about taking things down than the DMCA requires and they also don't allow counter-claims that would be allowed if they were actually following the DMCA. If it was just a DMCA takedown request, then the uploader would basically just have to say that it's not copyright infringement and then the only recourse for the takedown requester would be to take the uploader to court.
The real problem is that the cops face no recourse for blatantly defying a law they're suppose to follow - these are people that are, after all, suppose to enforce the law.
Even more fundamental is the adversarial relationship that the culture of policing has developed with the public. The warrior mindset is at the root of so many of these problems. We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service.
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.
> The solution is to reincorporate the warrior subculture into civilian life.
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?
That's how Europe got the crusades. Knights were in large part a response to raiders from the steppes and fjords, and when those raids slowed, the protectors turned into gangsters that needed to be sent on a fools errand.
I disagree strongly with this actually. The police shouldn't be a military force and shouldn't act like it but, at least in terms of the Army, rules of engagement taught to soldiers are a lot more focused on de-escalation and proper response to force than what most police officers receive.
I just think you need to filter out the nut-jobs that think they're Rambo and view the streets as a warzone.
I agree with the premise that American soldiers are taught and display a more rigid rules of engagement abroad but I would be interested to see exactly what kind of ex-soldier becomes a police officer.
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.
Actually yea - I can't deny that your proposed person is pretty likely to go into policing after serving in the military. But I do think that people with a strong sense of civil service would also be likely to follow that path, people (generally speaking) aren't going into the military for glory - a lot of folks do it out of civil obligation and another large slice is there since it's a good way to get some economic mobility.
That said, yea, glory hounds would make really scary police officers.
Rules of engagement depend on where you are, who you're fighting and who is watching. Turns out that the US doesn't enforce any RoE in its borders, and you can use all the brutality and shiny weapons that you want against people living there with little to no oversight at all.
Reducing the number of military veterans period would be a good place to start. The USA does not need a massive standing peacetime army/navy/airforce. There's a real human cost too -- we kill more of our own soldiers in accidents than in actual combat.
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.
If not the US, then who? Trump, for all his faults, was spot on about the Europe's lack of fiscal participation in NATO. They were enjoying the privileges of what you described without ever worrying about the need for protecting it because the US was footing the bill. If it wasn't for NATO, do you really think the Baltic States would still be free from Russia today? And what about the Pacific islands? Nobody is stepping up to the plate to protect the sovereignty of those countries, something they themselves aren't capable of doing against a force like China.
Europe's 'lack of fiscal participation' in NATO only looks anemic when compared to the United States, which alone outspends the entire rest of the world, combined, on its military.
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.
> 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.
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.
NATO was never about invading another country. It's purely intended to be a defensive pact (the whole Kosovo incident in the 90s notwithstanding). And that wasn't exactly Europe's response to Trump. Defense spending by European nations had been increasing since 2014 but a number of countries still did not meet their internal agreed-upon goal of 2% of GDP.
> Even more fundamental is the adversarial relationship that the culture of policing has developed with the public. The warrior mindset is at the root of so many of these problems. We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service.
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.
Grew up in a city that disbanded its police department.
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.
According to the FBI, the national case clearance rate was 13.9% for burglary and 30.4% for robbery in 2018. That means that for the average US citizen who reports one of the crimes you mention there is a ~70-85% chance that the police will show up and accomplish exactly nothing.
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.
The (positive) effect of law enforcement include more than just case clearance rates.
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.
This is a convenient self-justifying fantasy. You're straight up saying that police could fail to do anything about 97% of crimes and it would still be worth it for cities to dump 30-50% of their yearly budgets into them because "think of how bad it might be otherwise!" Be honest: do you apply such lax standards of effectiveness to any other area of your life? Would you pay 30% of your salary to go to a hospital that historically only cured 3% of patients? If so I've got some miracle leeches you might be interested in next time you're feeling ill.
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...
> We tend to have punishments that are large multiples of the benefits of committing the crime
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.
> Are the punishments for crimes committed by police officers scaled based on the likelihood of punishment?
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.
> 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?
"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?
> 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?
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.
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.
I'm sure there's a better source, but this site has a list of police budget figures for the 300 largest US cities with links to the budget reports: https://costofpolice.org
According to that list police budgets make up an average of 30% of overall spending.
Note: sometimes you'll get two people giving different numbers for the same city. AFAICT this happens most often when pensions are broken out as a separate budget item. The fact that cities break them out separately is sensible -- pensions are legally quite different from other budget items.
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).
They are saying that in evaluating police effectiveness it's important to not only consider the empirical data of case clearance rates but also to imagine how many people might have committed crimes but were deterred. Until experiments are made to measure the effectiveness of different strategies for affecting crime rates, each person will imagine a different answer to this question based on their beliefs about human nature and society.
Drug addicts looking for a quick crime to get cash for their next fix are not going to be sweating a 13.9% of going to jail, so that stat you are using is not relevant to real world criminal behavior. That stat instead holds sway over people that are not normally criminaly minded, but might find themselves in a situation presents itself. At that point, a >0% chance might make some think twice.
First, for people who are unclear about the term "clearance rate"... I found this definition on Google: "charge being laid" (someone was charged with a crime).
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 reasons you list are absolutely some of the reasons why police are not effective at addressing these forms of crime. And statistically they are not much better at addressing other forms of crime either.
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.
> 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.
A 50 percent chance is a lot better than 13.9 percent.
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).
I live in Seattle. I don't bother reporting property crime. The police won't investigate, the prosecutor won't charge people. Property crime is far underreported.
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.
On a really big share of these, the plates or car is stolen. And it's a lot of investigative work to go from a crappy CCTV picture of someone to a conviction.
People committing property crimes will trip themselves up and get caught eventually, even if the probability of any individual case being solved is low.
I don't think people are asking for abolishing the police force, but for restarting it with new or reformed people and with strong civilian oversight. Cops should go to jail for abuses.
People have literally been calling for just that here. The "replacements" as proposed are not by any stretch of thr imagination what you might call a "police force".
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.
Depends who's suggesting a replacement. Camden literally just created a new police force from the ground up to replace the deeply abusive one they disbanded. It's hard to disentangle the union-busting function from the culture-changing function, since the two are so closely intertwined in the US.
Camden NJ, in 2013? They hired back most of the officers who were fired when the department became a division of the county police. They went through more training, psych profiling, and then put more officers on the streets and implemented a broken windows policy to get the murder rate under control, which later was rolled back after protests.
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".
The OP that all this is in response to is not advocating that, which you can tell by the fact that they don't use the word "abolish":
> 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.
In the case of this city, it is more like a company is having a hard time hiring QA testers because the COO and all the directors have been publicly saying for months that they plan on firing all the testers and making the engineers do their own QA instead, because bugs are a code problem and engineers know code better, and if only we didn't have QA there wouldn't be any bugs in the first place.
Mind saying which city in specific? Googling only brings up Camden NJ as an example and from what I can tell things got really bad for a while then they rebuilt the police department. Which is, from what I understand, is what calls to disband the police really want.
> 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.
Camden didn't "abolish" their police force. It was rolled up into the police force of the surrounding county, along with some other changes in how the department was run and organized
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.
> The warrior mindset is at the root of so many of these problems. We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service.
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.
And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons.
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.
Policing obviously goes back ~350 years into the earliest history of the US. However, early policing in the US was privately funded and often employed individuals on a part-time basis. NYC for example setup a watch group all the way back in 1658.
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.
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.
Here's a short history (from a university professor whose "current research areas include transnational organized crime, human trafficking and the sex industry, and drug trafficking by teenagers in rural Kentucky") that supports the parent poster's description of the origins of policing in the US:
Have you ever considered doing a police ride along? Where I live you can spend an entire day side by side with a cop.
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.
> you can't disband the police because $(blatantly_ridiculous_reason).
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.
I understand your sentiment. Something is terrible broken in many police departments in the United States. It is appalling to see so many videos on YouTube of police violence where nothing happens to the police. Remember the video of the police person pushing over some old man trying to run away. Was that officer suspended or charged? I doubt it.
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.
Disbanding the police sounds a lot nicer than taking away the livelihoods of thousands and thousands of parents, most of whom are not raging racist bastards.
@chongli This is very true, the "warrior mindset". It's the prevailing mindset, to a certain extent, with the Australian police too. As an example, drink-driving ads in Australia typically feature a stern face behind a pair of ray-bans and a message to the effect that the police are going to be hunting the civilians. "You're in our sights". "Stop it or cop it", etc. Very divisive, and bound to encourage the warrior mentality in a certain proportion of the police force.
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.
That sounds good til you realize then you’d have released a huge number of highly trained, radicalized, disgruntled militants into the population.
The disbanding of the Iraqi military by the US occupation comes to mind.
Yes but now they don't have legal immunity from American citizens who both exercise their second amendment rights and willing to take proportional actions to defend themselves against individuals threatening their lives.
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.
If these folks are disgruntled militants then keeping them within or without of police jobs isn't going to impact that.
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.
Released? Right now they have a government issue car and firearm! They're paid to roam the streets! How could they possibly be any more "released" than they are now?
Some fat old police officers are no match for the (not disbanded) actual soldiers who are somehow often subject to more scrutiny than their civilian "counterparts".
Exactly. I'm astounded at the number of replies here who think, at its root, this is about copyright or the DMCA. This is about police departments, who after exhausting all efforts to try to prevent people from recording them, have moved on to trying these kind of hacks to prevent people from publishing said recordings. They're not just innocently jamming out to a random song in the middle of a police encounter. They're clearly doing it with the intent to disrupt citizens from documenting and publishing their actions.
I must be the only idiot who thinks this is the most genius thing I’ve ever seen. It’s very Sun Tzu to me — this group (from the few I’ve interacted with) feels beat down by censorship, so decides to use their ‘enemy’s’ strength...
I’ll just admire it for a minute then adjust accordingly.
I also found it kinda funny. And even more so that the cop is playing Sublime, and had to skip right past "April 29, 1992 (Miami)" (a song about participating in the Rodney King riots) to get to Santeria, assuming he has the album.
It is obnoxious though, we are expected to act in good faith with the ocifers, but they don't do the same.
ASCAP & BMI need to get involved and sue the police for illegally using music in a performance/live event/concert without the proper licensing. The videos people take are just evidence of the police's flagrant violations of the music licensing.
Two reasons: (1) we try to prune subthreads when they get too massive; and (2) this one was a step in a generic direction (i.e. police in general), away from the specifics of this story.
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.
What law are they defying by playing music? Motives aside, in principle, if people should be allowed to film why should they not be allowed to play music?
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.
Filming police activity, and posting the footage has been continuously upheld as a first amendment protected activity. If these claims are true then the police (acting as the government) are attempting to restrict free speech.
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.
Apparently, the suggestion of playing music to defeat witnesses was made in some warrior cop training seminar. What to do about that? They are training cops to defeat the constitution using copyright filters, that can't be right.
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.
Public performance of a copyrighted work. Unless the officer has a license to play the music for public consumption, it is illegal for him/her to do so.
I think this would be a pretty terrible abuse of that law - it would also be quite non-standard since listening to music on a boombox hasn't been prosecuted AFAIK[1].
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.
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.
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.
Sorry - I mean random with regard to the intent. The intent isn't to broadcast this music to the world so that dancing can happen - it is to specifically restrict the ability for observers to record the incident. Restricting the ability for observers to record police incidents is already illegal in most circumstances. I think making sure this is attempt to circumvent the law falls under the same laws and comes with the same penalties is important.
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.
Apparently you don't remember how hard Metallica went after their own fans for file sharing in the 90s. You should also consider that the person in question is a cop, not some random person. I'm sure that there are plenty of bands that would be happy to use this rule specifically against cops.
No, The idea that any court would say that someone walking around, playing music on their phone, while walking around outside, should be punished in any way, is so obviously false that it is just silly.
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.
I'm a bit late replying so I'm not sure if you're going to see this or not.
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 think this would be a pretty terrible abuse of that law
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.
> 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.
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.
Willful infringement of copyright is criminal. Incidental infringement is not (also incidental recording of music would probably not be civil infringement either in my honest and not at all a lawyer opinion).
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.
They will use the argument that their partner cop in the squad car is a "social acquaintance" or work friend, and that the music was intended for them.
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.
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.
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.
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
You are not infringing on anything by playing music to yourself, and it's not a matter of cases being failed to pursued, it's straight up legal to do so in every sense.
If there is some random person filming you - then they are infringing - not you.
If you record me playing a song on my phone and post that on youtube, you're responsible for any copyright infringement, not me. There is no law against playing a song on your phone, even if you're being recorded
Most music is under a copyright that explicitely prevents public diffusion without a license. Unless the music doesn't have such a limitation, or the police have a license, yes, playing music in a public fashion like that is most probably illegal
There are definitely cases where playing music violates the license, but I wouldn't call it illegal[1]. Playing music at some business almost certainly is not allowed by default, you'd probably need to get a permission from someone authorized to give you one (i.e. a different license). Playing music in public likely has similar rules.
If your phone has an FM radio, sure. However Internet radio doesn’t offer the same broadcast exemptions that traditional radio does, so you still need to deal with licensing when it comes to playing internet radio in public.
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.
Copyright holders often act in bad faith, non-copyright holders as well. We see both all the time on YouTube. Yet people continue to proceed in bad faith without repercussion.
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.
It’s obviously up to rights holders to decide what they would like to do. ASCAP is probably largely not interested in policing mundane and mostly personal uses of music in public places; especially a one-off event like a company luncheon, where relevant legal exemptions (at least for broadcast radio) exist. Seems like a case of not much to gain with a bit to lose.
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.
In 12 states, you are NOT allowed to film cops. This implies that in the other 38 states, the public has decided you are allowed. Law is subjective by spirit, and playing music so that anyone filming you cannot legally share the film seems like a violation of the spirit of the law.
The two/all party consent laws are unconstitutional when applied to filming police in public. Unfortunately, not all Federal Appellate Courts have had cases to made that ruling.
> 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.
A public performance would be in violation of civil law rather than criminal law. But if you're being pedantic you could argue that, yes, it was technically illegal.
I am not being pedantic. I don’t understand your position. It seems you are saying that the police officer is violating copyright by playing music in a public space. Whether or not ASCAP would come after me or not, is it really true that in the US I cannot play music aloud on public property?
I couldn’t find a clear definition of “public performance”. Everything I found related to a bar playing a song or a cover artist playing a song for money.
IANAL, but given that they are doing this in California, I would say Penal Code 135 PC [1], the willful destruction or hiding of evidence during a legal proceeding such as a criminal investigation. Police conduct during an arrest constitutes material evidence and thus the intentional playing of music that they believe will prevent those recordings from being produced or discoverable constitutes a willful hiding if not destruction of said evidence. Such a crime may result in up to 6 months in jail per offense.
Police should not be allowed to abuse copyright in this way. They're not playing the music out of some sort of self-expression, they're playing the music for the express purpose of tripping copyright filters, thus increasing the likelihood that otherwise legal livestreams and VODs would be muted or deleted.
I hope the RIAA comes down hard on this. Just as hard as they came down on Napster, tbh.
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).
> 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).
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.
> 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).
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.
What are you talking about? They're providing accountability for the actions of armed agents of the state, people with a literal license to kill. They're not forcing officers to do unboxing videos.
How does one person have enough interesting interactions with the police to build a channel about that? They must be actively trying to create entertaining encounters.
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.
He's a white guy from Santa Monica. The only clear difference in our life experience is that he's built a business out of posting videos about the police.
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.
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.
Surely it's the cop performing an unlicensed public performance of a copyrighted work who should be being DCMA'd here .... this video is just evidence of the crime
No for that scenario the rights owner, Sublime or whomever, must sue for payment and damages for the unauthorized use of their work. Is enough of Sublime still alive to comment?
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.
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.
>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.
There have been proposals to have hardware refuse to record copyrighted works. Though of course if that was the context then "citizens aren't prevented from filming" wouldn't be true anyway.
An argument can be made that uploading to social media is part of the "recording" process.
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?
The supreme court has upheld that a 'chilling effect' (an action that does not directly stop free speech, but has the intent of discouraging it) is an invalid limitation on free speech. They have also ruled that filming and disseminating footage of police is protected speech.
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.
The act of recording is making a record of an event. The recording isn't complete until the record is made permanent.
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.
It's a livestream - without the upload, nothing gets recorded. It's as much a part of the recording process as film is in an analogue camera. This specific act would be the direct analogue of ripping film out of a camera and exposing it to light so it can't be developed.
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.