Please, no. Not from cops too.

I know I told two copyright madness stories just yesterday, but it’s not my fault if there is so much of this stuff that needs the widest possible diffusion. And this is more serious too.

One month ago, a Los Angeles activist entered the Beverly Hills police department, to request body camera footage from an incident in which he received a ticket he felt was unfair. He streamed the whole visit, as he usually does on his Instagram channel whenever he interacts with police officials.

Everything went smoothly, until the police sergeant realizes that the activist was “live-streaming the interaction, including showing work contact information for another officer”.

At that point, the sergeant:

• stopped talking
• pulled out his phone
• made it play some song, at full volume
• did nothing but staring at the phone, for a full minute

This, says the Vice article where I read the full story,

“seem[ed] to be an intentional (if misguided) tactic to use [the automatic copyright violation filters on social media] to prevent himself from being filmed”.

Automatic blocks for copyright violations are everywhere, and don’t work. Just ask Metallica, victims of their own copyright, as I wrote just yesterday, or the lawyers prevented from copyright filters to explain how copyright filters work.

Vice elaborates on whether cops that do this stuff, for those reasons, could be prosecuted or not for misconduct. I have no idea, and frankly I don’t care, if things really stand as Vice reported.

If law enforcement officials (anywhere!) can be really led to believe that, if there is “work contact information for another officer” to protect, tickling copyright filters could and should work better (both technically, and legally) than asking to point the camera somewhere else… for me, that is one more proof that copyright is badly, badly broken today.