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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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said he didn't play it for himself. His immediate surrounding and those in it are exactly what would make it public performance.

That's not a public performance. Otherwise using a radio would basically be illegal. Playing music for people waiting in the lobby at the station, or restaurant patrons, DJ at a club or event -> public performance. Playing music at your desk/office/car/workspace/radio for yourself and whoever you happen to be working with at the moment -> not a public performance. If you want to make a more eccentric claim, you shoul…

Radios are exempt because the broadcasting station has already received a license for public performance. The station is conducting the public performance and not the equipment holder.

OTOH, when you purchase (technically, receive a license for) a song from, say, iTunes or Spotify, that license doesn't include a public performance right. That's the difference.

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If it was, anyone walking down the street playing music would be violating copyright. It would indeed be so, if you were playing it with the express intent of having others listen to it. Also, never underestimate the eagerness of the entertainment industry to decide that you need license to play something.

Well it wasn't with the express intent of having others listen to it. It was to stop them from being able to see the video.

Regardless, you simply don't know anything about IP law if you think this to be the case. There needs to be a harmed party, and that needs to be the copyright owner.

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

#263

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…

https://www.bmi.com/faq/entry/what_is_a_public_performance_o... > A “public performance” of music is defined in U.S. copyright law to include any music played outside a normal circle of friends and family that occurs in any public place. This is a quote from a RIAA member explaining their interpretation of public performance.

Show me a single case where an award has been granted for this sort of thing. This is not a restaurant/bar playing it for the entertainment of their guests.

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He played it in the normal way you play music, where others can hear it. He isn't responsible for the fact that it is being filmed and shown more widely. That said, he should be fired for reasons that have nothing to do with copyright. It is an obnoxious attempt to avoid accountability.

The recording isn't what made it public performance. The normal way you play music is for your own enjoyment. It's incidental if other people overhear. He said that wasn't what he did.

That doesn't make it a public performance. Are you saying that a court cares whether or not you are enjoying it? Really? This is so absurd.

The harmed party needs to be the owner of the copyright, because people listen to this instead of paying them.

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

#265

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…

The idea predates the web.

It doesn't work now, just like it didn't with the old urban legend. (You can view this video)

Amendments or rights are irrelevant to this. They don't protect you from being so lazy you can't be bother to subtitle something to put it on your favourite media host. Pretty sure the founding fathers didn't design the constitution for that.

In fact it feels like people want the right to easily harass other.

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No its not. Absolutely nobody, in the entire world, would ever be brought to court because they played a couple seconds of music, on their phone, while walking down the street. Don't pretend. Don't make up funny narratives, because you think that a police officer "deserves" it. This silly hypothetical just isn't going to happen. And people are lying to themselves that something like that would happen, because it soun…

"...send someone to jail because they played a couple seconds of a song, in a public street, on their phone." No one is saying this. You are leaving out a lot of crucial details that have been brought up.

> No one is saying this

Call it whatever you want, I am talking about any form of major copyright consequence on that person, because they played a couple seconds of a song, in the street.

Its just not going to happen. No judge will ever cause any significant consequence on someone doing that, solely as a result of a copyright issue.

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

#268
post #56

This sounds like a great ml app idea: Remove music from audio while keeping the other voices. I wonder how hard it would be to keep them separate.

Spleeter [1] does a really good job of it. It can separate out the vocals, accompaniment, drums, bass, and piano. It does a really phenomenal job at it, though there can be a bit of reverb in the vocals if there's a lot of reverb in the base. Splitting out individual vocalists is a lot harder, and I haven't found any pre-trained models that manage it. There's a lot of speaker separation [2] models, but they are train…

I immediately thought of spleeter too as I've had great success in experiments to strip out unwanted music overlays (eg podcasts that insist on adding their end of show theme tune whilst guests are still speaking!)

I haven't tried speaker separation, but it seems there are some models from SpeechBrain on HuggingFace that seem to handle this:

https://huggingface.co/models?filter=Speech%20Separation

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is permissible to rebroadcast Radio and Television broadcasts for small businesses with certain limitations, but anything else requires paying for licensing: https://www.nfib.com/content/news/legal/you-might-need-a-lic...

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

#270
Would adding some other instrument (shittyflute?) playing while the cop doesn't talk qualify as creative work, or render the video different enough for their algorithms, so that it has more chances not to be flagged?

Anyway, a possible solution would be to swap the audio with a fsk encoding of a timecode plus decentralized hard to take down p2p address in which the users can find the original audio. A browser plugin could automate everything by finding the audio track then play it in sync with no apparent difference from the original.

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