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Police officer plays Taylor Swift song to keep a video off YouTube

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Re: Police officer plays Taylor Swift song to keep a video off YouTube

#211

Post by handrous »

vxNsr wrote: post #170
pc86 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attempting to stop the distribution of Constitutionally protected speech isn't retaliation?

It’s unclear to me how recording something is a first amendment issue at all, let alone a speech issue. TheVerge makes this unsubstantiated claim and many people here accept it, but I struggle to understand how the first amendment protects recording something. ::Edit:: I’m being rate limited due to getting flagged and downvoted so I’ll reply here: The EFF link keeps calling it a 1st amendment right, but doesn’t actua…

> I’m just saying it’s not clear to me how it pertains in anyway to the first amendment.

The EFF link itself links to:

https://www.eff.org/document/eff-amicus-brief-martin-v-rolli...

Among many others, which contain a rabbit-trail of case law to explore.

The ACLU article links directly to:

https://www.aclum.org/sites/default/files/field_documents/20...

Which is a court ruling that appears to be directly relevant to the questions you're asking, and contains a similar rabbit trail of other case law (one "Glik v. Cunniffe, 655 F.3d 78 (1st Cir. 2011)", in particular, is repeatedly cited).

This is what one encounters pretty much any time one asks "why is/isn't [thing] constitutional under [amendment]"? Lots of reading.

The short answer is just, "courts have ruled it so".

Re: Police officer plays Taylor Swift song to keep a video off YouTube

#212

Post by Simulacra »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #191

Interesting article for two reasons, how the practice originated and what it implies. The practice seems to be somewhat wide spread (in the distance between departments case). That might be because it came from a Facebook group or forum where Law Enforcement officers exchange tips. The second is the choice of artist (Swift) who has been in a pretty visible battle with ownership of her music. I suspect that if the off…

"explicitly attempting to deny you your 1st Amendment right "

I disagree. It's YouTube that is denying your first amendment right. You have the right to record the officer, but you have no right nor control over what the officer can do. There is absolutely no law against playing a taylor swift song, as distasteful as it may be. He's not stopping the person filming.

There is explicit, and there is reality, and this just doesn't rise to the level of a constitutional violation.

Re: Police officer plays Taylor Swift song to keep a video off YouTube

#213

Post by cratermoon »

asdff wrote: post #105
dctoedt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't that public performance and doesn't that require the police dept to pay royalties? Yes, but under current law, states can ignore the royalty requirement with impunity: "[C]opyright owners suffering infringement by state entities cannot seek the remedies provided by the Copyright Act." [0] Police departments are almost certain to be held to be state entities, I'd think, and therefore immune from individual per…

I thought a state entity referred to the State government. Police departments are run by the local city or county government.

In this case the definition of state that applies is "a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory". In other words, any government generally.

Re: Police officer plays Taylor Swift song to keep a video off YouTube

#214

Post by dragonwriter »

robbrown451 wrote: post #129
dragonwriter wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless you think it violates copyright to play music in public spaces. Generally, yes: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106 ---begin quote--- 17 U.S. Code § 106 - Exclusive rights in copyrighted works Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonoreco…

Courts would never in a million years call this a copyright violation. If it was, anyone walking down the street playing music would be violating copyright. Copyright law has a lot of subtlety and courts have to make reasonable decisions. Considering this a violation is not in any way a reasonable decision. Taylor Swift and her record company are not harmed. Others probably are harmed (the public), but that isn't a c…

> Courts would never in a million years call this a copyright violation. If it was, anyone walking down the street playing music would be violating copyright.

Because purpose is an element of Fair Use analysis, and because fair use is an exception to copyright, and because the purpose differs radically between the two cases, there are a whole lot of other assumptions you need to make for this “if...then...” statement to hold.

Re: Police officer plays Taylor Swift song to keep a video off YouTube

#217

Post by jopsen »

LinuxBender wrote: post #24

Perhaps a work around would be to post without audio and add text captions, fully accepting that if the people in the video are wearing masks, the captions could turn into bad lipreading memes.

Or just use mask/obfuscate the audio, and face while your at it.

In some ways, the whole debate could be more civil if officers faces and voices were blurred.

After all, it's not really the individual officer who is at fault: it's the system that trained the officer, and the department policies that require officers to apply unreasonable force.

There are also many other contributing factors to policing issues in the US. But the argument that it's just "a few bad apples" seems like deflection to me. And if it's not just a few bad apples, then why do we need to publicly shame individual officers who are just doing their job as they were trained to do, in line with department policies? (Doesn't such public shaming just create opposition and resentment, distracting from the issue at hand)

Just saying... in other countries media don't go around posting/shaming people publicly if there is no conviction. (Sure, there is a balance, a few exceptions, and lots of nuance)

Re: Police officer plays Taylor Swift song to keep a video off YouTube

#218

Post by dragonwriter »

asdff wrote: post #105
dctoedt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't that public performance and doesn't that require the police dept to pay royalties? Yes, but under current law, states can ignore the royalty requirement with impunity: "[C]opyright owners suffering infringement by state entities cannot seek the remedies provided by the Copyright Act." [0] Police departments are almost certain to be held to be state entities, I'd think, and therefore immune from individual per…

I thought a state entity referred to the State government. Police departments are run by the local city or county government.

From the point of view of federal Constitutional law (except provisions designating powers or obligations to particular state bodies, of course) all elements and administrative subdivisions of states are part of the state government, even though each has its own separate legal personality.

Re: Police officer plays Taylor Swift song to keep a video off YouTube

#219

Post by CyberShadow »

tshaddox wrote: post #200
CyberShadow wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is mostly technical. Depending on the phone, call audio isn't implemented as much in software as wired directly (in some variable degree) to the radio hardware. This is why the quality and success rate of call recording apps varies - it depends how many kinds of configurations the app authors managed to implement support / workarounds for.

Is that so? I can make phone calls with my iPhone on wireless Bluetooth headphones. Does the radio hardware directly stream to whatever headphones my iPhone is paired with? I suppose it’s possible, but it strikes me as unlikely.

Judging from that call recording apps apparently need to implement support for recording calls over Bluetooth separately, I would conclude that this does go over a different path, but still needs to be handled explicitly.

Re: Police officer plays Taylor Swift song to keep a video off YouTube

#220

Post by googlryas »

akersten wrote: post #198
oh_sigh wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're not looking at it like a prosecutor/RIAA goon would, because they have not sued anyone ever for merely playing music on their phone while standing in public. What you're doing is taking a phrase which has a contextual meaning within copyright law, looking at the individual words of the phrase based on their common usage, and then saying that your new understanding based on the individual words is how copyr…

> because they have not sued anyone ever for merely playing music on their phone while standing in public. But that's not (just) what the officer was doing - he was playing music as background to his business operation, which RIAA have definitely sued establishments over[0]. If you're playing music as a soundtrack for your business (in this case, the business of law enforcement), you need a license. Even in a non-bus…

So by your expert understanding of the law, no person is ever allowed to listen to music while working if someone else happens to be near them. Gotcha.
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