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Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming

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Re: Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming

#171

Post by genericone »

jMyles wrote: post #160
blt wrote: post #53

Anyone suggesting that this tactic can be stopped with copyright law is hilariously missing the point. The cops will just find a pro-cop artist and record label to play. The problem here is much deeper.

The idea that it's forbidden to publish what your eyes can see and ears can hear, in public, is completely insane. What is freedom of the press if not this?

Weaponization of another human being's emotions against them, a human who in their official capacity is not allowed to defend themself, for the sake of video views, for ad money, paid for by companies willing to exchange money for bulk attention or bulk meta-data. Man, humanity is fucked.

Re: Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming

#172

Post by woah »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #24
tzs wrote: post #23

I wonder if the copyright owners could do something to stop the officers? What the officers are doing is probably a public performance and those generally requires permission of the copyright owner. There are some exceptions, such as for playing a radio or TV broadcast at businesses that are under certain sizes specified in square feet. I think the officers were probably playing recording from their phones or using a…

I know everyone is looking for a loophole to prosecute these officers But let’s not rush to make listening to music on the job illegal. That wasn’t the intent of copyright laws that prohibit public performance.

Are you serious? You’re telling me you think police officers should go around blasting tunes on a boom box? Seems like a serious lack of professionalism. What a straw man

Re: Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming

#173

Post by dahart »

analognoise wrote: post #28
dahart wrote: post #18

I’m suddenly interested in making a neural network that can mute a known reference audio from a stream while leaving the surrounding audio in tact. Doesn’t something like this already exist? It seems like Instagram and YouTube could pretty easily leave audio-edited videos online while addressing the copyright violation, without resorting to takedowns or account bans.

You don't need a neural network for this - after song identification, you might be able to stream the right song at the right location, then simply play the song "inverted" - you'll increase background noise but the song won't be identifiable. It's a very simple DSP operation after song identification. It sounds like a lot of fun actually. The front end location identification might not have an extant solution, but p…

Yeah it does seem technically within reach and potentially solvable. I was thinking of including song identification when I mentioned an NN as a potential solution. I’m also assuming that there a bunch of other serious complications like resampling and clock skew between the two streams, a changing frequency response over time, etc. You can imagine that if there are audio dropouts or song pauses in the video you’re trying to fix, then naively subtracting the source song will result in accidentally playing the copyrighted song instead of removing it. And it might be trickier if people sing along to the song, etc. I think this situation is quite a bit tougher than the standard trick people use to remove ambient audio by recording with a 2nd mic further away and subtracting it.

Re: Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming

#174

Post by mobilemidget »

burkaman wrote: post #99
tzs wrote: post #23

I wonder if the copyright owners could do something to stop the officers? What the officers are doing is probably a public performance and those generally requires permission of the copyright owner. There are some exceptions, such as for playing a radio or TV broadcast at businesses that are under certain sizes specified in square feet. I think the officers were probably playing recording from their phones or using a…

It is almost impossible to prosecute police for straightforward violent crimes, I don't think anybody is going to get them on copyright infringement.

Don't underestimate Hollywood and alike :)

But I can imagine that playing certain music for a large crowd requires a specific license? Something like a radio station?

Re: Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming

#175

Post by dahart »

sorenjan wrote: post #153
dahart wrote: post #18

I’m suddenly interested in making a neural network that can mute a known reference audio from a stream while leaving the surrounding audio in tact. Doesn’t something like this already exist? It seems like Instagram and YouTube could pretty easily leave audio-edited videos online while addressing the copyright violation, without resorting to takedowns or account bans.

Sounds like the Cocktail party problem. https://www.comsol.com/blogs/have-you-heard-about-the-cockta...

It’s definitely similar, though should be a lot easier when one of the things you’re trying to distinguish and remove has a known high quality reference track you can use, right?

Re: Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming

#176

Post by phs318u »

Another approach here is for the streaming services to tweak their takedown algorithms - if they detect a police officer in the video don’t automatically take down the video. Lobbying for this is probably themost likely to yield results. Police opposition to such a move would expose their real intent at which point shifting the focus back to the police actions becomes viable.

Re: Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming

#177

Post by andrewflnr »

rootusrootus wrote: post #166
andrewflnr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a potential neighbor: no, it's not ok. If I can hear your music, you are intruding in my space. I need at least one place on the planet where I can get some actual quiet without earplugs.

I hear my neighbors all the time. They start up their cars, play basketball in the street, play music in their garage workshop, etc. There are myriad sounds that happen all day long when you live around other people. If you require silence then you choose not to live in a community.

Just because some noises are unavoidable doesn't make it less inconsiderate to knowingly inflict them on people. Music in particular has relatively long duration, is by nature harder to ignore than many of the incidental noises you mentioned, and is easily contained in headphones.

Your last sentence is a common fallacy: just because I pick a certain set of annoyances on a scale of trade-offs (in this case, the scale of living in an apartment to living in the wilderness) doesn't mean I am required to unquestioningly soak up all those annoyances. If that's your logic, you could never speak up about any problem you could in principle escape from, even if that escape would result in bigger problems. This "leave if you don't like it" approach to criticism, where leaving is very expensive and especially where the solution is very cheap, is also not ok (as it more obviously would not be ok in a political context).

I'm not asking for a lot. Just use headphones.

Re: Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming

#178

Post by dahart »

Shivetya wrote: post #146
dahart wrote: post #18

I’m suddenly interested in making a neural network that can mute a known reference audio from a stream while leaving the surrounding audio in tact. Doesn’t something like this already exist? It seems like Instagram and YouTube could pretty easily leave audio-edited videos online while addressing the copyright violation, without resorting to takedowns or account bans.

Nah, I am more interested in charging the police officers with DMCA violations and penalties on top of disturbing the peace and purposeful interference with someone exercising their First Amendment rights. Seriously, we don't need to fix the DMCA. This isn't the problem here. The problem is staring us in the face. Police are empowered by their unions which have a stranglehold on local if not national politics; even t…

Isn’t undermining someone’s ability to use copyrighted material with the intent of causing a video takedown in the first place going to be a lot easier to achieve, and have the same outcome that you want?

It isn’t realistic to think the officers could be prosecuted for DMCA violations, nor is it even that clear cut - they aren’t posting the videos that are being taking down. It takes two parties here to result in the copyright violation.

This is definitely not a good look for law enforcement to fight against public videos this way, even if it’s a clever hack. It is potentially violating the law, and it runs against the very reasons they have body cams. But enforcement won’t be easy and requires proving intent, which makes it even harder. So much simpler to just take away this particular avenue for avoiding public records.

Re: Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming

#179

Post by User23 »

tzs wrote: post #23

I wonder if the copyright owners could do something to stop the officers? What the officers are doing is probably a public performance and those generally requires permission of the copyright owner. There are some exceptions, such as for playing a radio or TV broadcast at businesses that are under certain sizes specified in square feet. I think the officers were probably playing recording from their phones or using a…

> I wonder if the copyright owners could do something to stop the officers?

The copyright owners probably live in Beverly Hills and are quite alright with their police keeping the riff-raff out.

Re: Multiple Beverly Hills PD officers now weaponizing copyright against streaming

#180

Post by matheusmoreira »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #131

There are many posts on HN about invasion of privacy and surveillance. Even if you’re “not doing anything wrong” you should strongly oppose any data collection that could be used against you in the future. On the other hand we also seem to permit recording in other situations like law enforcement. Eager to hear how people distinguish these two scenarios. Is it that if you’re a public figure or tax funded then your ac…

> Is it that if you’re a public figure or tax funded then your actions should be open to public scrutiny?

Yes, always. Governments are given extraordinary powers by the people. Transparency is necessary to ensure these powers aren't being abused. Otherwise it's easy for corruption to set in.

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