6 ms·

Why are so many cops blasting music while being filmed? [video]

43 points by Jugurtha 5y ago

gadders 5y ago
Spoiler alert: they hope that the copyrighted music stops the video being allowed to be shown on Youtube etc.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Yup. Minimal editing will remove the music though, plus it's still evidence in a court so it's an attempt to avoid public outrage. App idea: Strip copyrighted music from a video while retaining voice. Shouldn't edit the original video though, it's evidence.
  - bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
    Interesting idea, but wouldn't the resulting video technically be a derivative work of the copyrighted music? Not saying that kills the idea, it's just an extra complication.
    - kybernetikos 5y ago
      I'd be surprised if that was the legal view. If I take a picture of someone next to the Mona Lisa and then crop the Mona Lisa out of it, that doesn't make the picture of the person a derivative work of the Mona Lisa.
      - bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
        I don't know if image cropping is a good metaphor. The algorithm for removing copyrighted music while preserving other sound presumably "subtracts" the copyrighted music. Thus, the copyrighted music is used to create the music-less video. IANAL, so I defer to anyone with legal expertise.
      - ankurpatel 5y ago
        They don't mean the end result but the process of detecting something requires you to have a copy of that work and hence your software needs the copyrighted material in order to detect copyrighted songs to remove accurately.
  - rlpb 5y ago
    Even just removing the audio entirely from the affected sections and providing subtitles instead should do, surely? Point out that the perpetrator deliberately played music to try to prevent publication and they will lose any claim of the subtitles being false or edited in the court of public opinion. And surely this attempt to block publication will amplify any outrage.
- giantg2 5y ago
  It won't affect it's usefulness in recording a crime or misconduct for use in a complaint. Frankly, blasting or playing music during an interaction is unprofessional and people should file a complaint against any officer doing this.
  - gadders 5y ago
    Yeah. I'm not anti-police, but if they're doing that it's not a good sign.
lowercased 5y ago
i'd think self-hosting or smaller platforms might be able to circumvent this... I've may have asked before but... Why aren't the cops hit with license violations for public performance of these songs? They likely don't have a BMI license (or... whatever you need).
- Uehreka 5y ago
  You and I both know that would be way too cool to happen in real life.
- jasongill 5y ago
  If you watch the video, they cover this ("Why aren't the cops hit with license violations for public performance of these songs?") - basically, a judge would have to be convinced by the rightsholders that they intended for the music to be heard by a wide audience, which is clearly the opposite of what they want. It's the same reason that you can't be "hit with license violations" for listening to music in your car with the windows down, effectively.
  - flir 5y ago
    Intend, or are aware it will happen?
  - kop316 5y ago
    > a judge would have to be convinced by the rightsholders that they intended for the music to be heard by a wide audience, which is clearly the opposite of what they want. I would actually argue exactly that they are intending for the music to be heard by a wide audience. Their audience is "anyone physically around so they know that filming will have this affect".
  - giantg2 5y ago
    There is another element here. The courts have ruled that police actions on duty and in public interactions are consider public and not subject to most privacy laws, including recording them without permission. This means that their actions can be recorded and broadcast (the very reason they are playing this music to avoid that). It shouldn't matter what the intent is if they are a public figure, then they should know that others can film them and that recording can be broadcast. So they know they are being recorded as a public official and that it could be broadcast to a wider audience. Playing a song to try to limit that broadcast is a completely illogical and stupid idea. If they didn't play it, there wouldn't be any copyright music to be concerned with. By playing it, they know this video could be broadcast on platforms or media that don't filter and that it absolutely, without question, leads to unlicensed reproduction. Basically standards for public officials are different from normal people.
merricksb 5y ago
Multiple earlier discussions in Feb and Jul this year, linked from this comment by dang over 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27716367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27716367
duxup 5y ago
"so many" How many? I've seen a number of articles on this and mostly the same videos. I feel like this is akin to twitter outrage where I don't doubt a thing happened ... I just can't gauge how much it happens vs. how much coverage there is.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hartator 5y ago
  Yeah, the same exact fact got twisted so much that you feel you have a giant wave.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I don't think it's very common. I think some departments are starting to tell officers not to do this. It's unprofessional and a complaint should be filed against any officer doing it.
  - duxup 5y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if a number of departments just as policy outright told them "Don't do this, it makes you look silly / guilty of something."
mabbo 5y ago
It seems not too terribly difficult to subtract the copyright audio from the videos. Step 1: Identify the audio being played via Shazaam or similar algorithms. Step 2: Find the overlap between the copyright song and the video's audio, because it won't be a perfect match. Step 3: Subtract that audio from the video's audio. It wouldn't be perfect and I'll bet it creates a lot of weirdness if, say, the office sings your Miranda Rights to the same tune as the song, but overall it would work and it would help stamp out this sort of problem. You could make a website that does this for uploaded videos.
- jstanley 5y ago
  I'm actually really curious to find out whether this would work. It sounds quite easy to test, I wonder if anyone has already done it? My feeling is that it wouldn't work very well at all, because of things like the Doppler effect shifting the sound as you move the mic closer to or further from the source, and also the sampling on the microphone might be out of phase with the original recording. But the more I think about it, the more I think those might only be minor problems and it would actually work well? EDIT: And the frequency response of the speaker & microphone are almost certainly non-uniform. EDIT2: From a quick test, it doesn't even slightly work. Here's what I did: 1. Find a song on youtube 2. Save the song to an MP3 with https://www.bestmp3converter.com https://www.bestmp3converter.com (or use youtube-dl - bestmp3converter.com probably uses youtube-dl) 3. Play the song on YouTube and record it using my phone 4. Load the MP3 and the recording from my phone in Audacity as 2 separate tracks 5. Amplify the phone recording until it looks like it matches the MP3 (Effect -> Amplify) 6. Delete some samples at the start of the phone recording so that the 2 tracks visually line up 7. Invert one of the tracks (Effect -> Invert) 8. Add the 2 tracks together (select both tracks, then Tracks -> Mix -> Mix and Render to New Track) 9. Mute the 2 original tracks and listen to the mixed result - it still sounds exactly like the song. It's not even slightly muffled. It sounds the same even if you don't invert one of the tracks. I think this is just much too far away from lining up sample-for-sample to be close to working.
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    In a job I had a couple of decades ago, I did work very much like this (not with music, but along the same lines). This certainly can be done, but your method isn't the way to do it. There are two primary methods of accomplishing this. The fast and dirty method is to employ a notch filter to exclude all frequencies outside of those used by the human speaking voice (which, fortunately, is a rather narrow frequency range). The second is to perform some fancy mathemetics to be more selective about what you're filtering out and when. There are a number of different approaches to this, but they typically involve autocorrelations or crosscorrelations. Both methods will cause a degradation of the audio you want to keep (the quick and dirty method will cause more degradation than the sophisticated methods). But the Q&D is often good enough, and is often used by karaoke machines and the like. Simply trying to subtract out the known signal (as you were doing) is technically plausible -- and is done for certain types of signals -- but is very hard to do effectively. There are too many environmental effects that will distort the signal and make naive subtraction ineffective.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
azabua 5y ago
or you can post your video on s3 buckets that don't use any copy write algorithm to block your evidence
bityard 5y ago
For those who don't want to watch a video for the answer: so that if the video gets posted to YouTube, it will get taken down by Google's copyright system.
- antisol 5y ago
  Thanks Your Text: 97 bytes, ~2 seconds to read Youtube video: ~45000000 bytes, 5 minutes to watch. I'll never understand it.

43 points by Jugurtha 5y ago

gadders 5y ago

Spoiler alert: they hope that the copyrighted music stops the video being allowed to be shown on Youtube etc.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Yup. Minimal editing will remove the music though, plus it's still evidence in a court so it's an attempt to avoid public outrage. App idea: Strip copyrighted music from a video while retaining voice. Shouldn't edit the original video though, it's evidence.
- bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
  Interesting idea, but wouldn't the resulting video technically be a derivative work of the copyrighted music? Not saying that kills the idea, it's just an extra complication.
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    I'd be surprised if that was the legal view. If I take a picture of someone next to the Mona Lisa and then crop the Mona Lisa out of it, that doesn't make the picture of the person a derivative work of the Mona Lisa.
    - bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
      I don't know if image cropping is a good metaphor. The algorithm for removing copyrighted music while preserving other sound presumably "subtracts" the copyrighted music. Thus, the copyrighted music is used to create the music-less video. IANAL, so I defer to anyone with legal expertise.
    - ankurpatel 5y ago
      They don't mean the end result but the process of detecting something requires you to have a copy of that work and hence your software needs the copyrighted material in order to detect copyrighted songs to remove accurately.
- rlpb 5y ago
  Even just removing the audio entirely from the affected sections and providing subtitles instead should do, surely? Point out that the perpetrator deliberately played music to try to prevent publication and they will lose any claim of the subtitles being false or edited in the court of public opinion. And surely this attempt to block publication will amplify any outrage.
giantg2 5y ago
It won't affect it's usefulness in recording a crime or misconduct for use in a complaint. Frankly, blasting or playing music during an interaction is unprofessional and people should file a complaint against any officer doing this.
- gadders 5y ago
  Yeah. I'm not anti-police, but if they're doing that it's not a good sign.

lowercased 5y ago

i'd think self-hosting or smaller platforms might be able to circumvent this... I've may have asked before but... Why aren't the cops hit with license violations for public performance of these songs? They likely don't have a BMI license (or... whatever you need).

Uehreka 5y ago
You and I both know that would be way too cool to happen in real life.
jasongill 5y ago
If you watch the video, they cover this ("Why aren't the cops hit with license violations for public performance of these songs?") - basically, a judge would have to be convinced by the rightsholders that they intended for the music to be heard by a wide audience, which is clearly the opposite of what they want. It's the same reason that you can't be "hit with license violations" for listening to music in your car with the windows down, effectively.
- flir 5y ago
  Intend, or are aware it will happen?
- kop316 5y ago
  > a judge would have to be convinced by the rightsholders that they intended for the music to be heard by a wide audience, which is clearly the opposite of what they want. I would actually argue exactly that they are intending for the music to be heard by a wide audience. Their audience is "anyone physically around so they know that filming will have this affect".
- giantg2 5y ago
  There is another element here. The courts have ruled that police actions on duty and in public interactions are consider public and not subject to most privacy laws, including recording them without permission. This means that their actions can be recorded and broadcast (the very reason they are playing this music to avoid that). It shouldn't matter what the intent is if they are a public figure, then they should know that others can film them and that recording can be broadcast. So they know they are being recorded as a public official and that it could be broadcast to a wider audience. Playing a song to try to limit that broadcast is a completely illogical and stupid idea. If they didn't play it, there wouldn't be any copyright music to be concerned with. By playing it, they know this video could be broadcast on platforms or media that don't filter and that it absolutely, without question, leads to unlicensed reproduction. Basically standards for public officials are different from normal people.

merricksb 5y ago

Multiple earlier discussions in Feb and Jul this year, linked from this comment by dang over 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27716367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27716367

duxup 5y ago

"so many" How many? I've seen a number of articles on this and mostly the same videos. I feel like this is akin to twitter outrage where I don't doubt a thing happened ... I just can't gauge how much it happens vs. how much coverage there is.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hartator 5y ago
Yeah, the same exact fact got twisted so much that you feel you have a giant wave.
giantg2 5y ago
I don't think it's very common. I think some departments are starting to tell officers not to do this. It's unprofessional and a complaint should be filed against any officer doing it.
- duxup 5y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if a number of departments just as policy outright told them "Don't do this, it makes you look silly / guilty of something."

mabbo 5y ago

It seems not too terribly difficult to subtract the copyright audio from the videos. Step 1: Identify the audio being played via Shazaam or similar algorithms. Step 2: Find the overlap between the copyright song and the video's audio, because it won't be a perfect match. Step 3: Subtract that audio from the video's audio. It wouldn't be perfect and I'll bet it creates a lot of weirdness if, say, the office sings your Miranda Rights to the same tune as the song, but overall it would work and it would help stamp out this sort of problem. You could make a website that does this for uploaded videos.

jstanley 5y ago
I'm actually really curious to find out whether this would work. It sounds quite easy to test, I wonder if anyone has already done it? My feeling is that it wouldn't work very well at all, because of things like the Doppler effect shifting the sound as you move the mic closer to or further from the source, and also the sampling on the microphone might be out of phase with the original recording. But the more I think about it, the more I think those might only be minor problems and it would actually work well? EDIT: And the frequency response of the speaker & microphone are almost certainly non-uniform. EDIT2: From a quick test, it doesn't even slightly work. Here's what I did: 1. Find a song on youtube 2. Save the song to an MP3 with https://www.bestmp3converter.com https://www.bestmp3converter.com (or use youtube-dl - bestmp3converter.com probably uses youtube-dl) 3. Play the song on YouTube and record it using my phone 4. Load the MP3 and the recording from my phone in Audacity as 2 separate tracks 5. Amplify the phone recording until it looks like it matches the MP3 (Effect -> Amplify) 6. Delete some samples at the start of the phone recording so that the 2 tracks visually line up 7. Invert one of the tracks (Effect -> Invert) 8. Add the 2 tracks together (select both tracks, then Tracks -> Mix -> Mix and Render to New Track) 9. Mute the 2 original tracks and listen to the mixed result - it still sounds exactly like the song. It's not even slightly muffled. It sounds the same even if you don't invert one of the tracks. I think this is just much too far away from lining up sample-for-sample to be close to working.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  In a job I had a couple of decades ago, I did work very much like this (not with music, but along the same lines). This certainly can be done, but your method isn't the way to do it. There are two primary methods of accomplishing this. The fast and dirty method is to employ a notch filter to exclude all frequencies outside of those used by the human speaking voice (which, fortunately, is a rather narrow frequency range). The second is to perform some fancy mathemetics to be more selective about what you're filtering out and when. There are a number of different approaches to this, but they typically involve autocorrelations or crosscorrelations. Both methods will cause a degradation of the audio you want to keep (the quick and dirty method will cause more degradation than the sophisticated methods). But the Q&D is often good enough, and is often used by karaoke machines and the like. Simply trying to subtract out the known signal (as you were doing) is technically plausible -- and is done for certain types of signals -- but is very hard to do effectively. There are too many environmental effects that will distort the signal and make naive subtraction ineffective.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

azabua 5y ago

or you can post your video on s3 buckets that don't use any copy write algorithm to block your evidence

bityard 5y ago

For those who don't want to watch a video for the answer: so that if the video gets posted to YouTube, it will get taken down by Google's copyright system.

antisol 5y ago
Thanks Your Text: 97 bytes, ~2 seconds to read Youtube video: ~45000000 bytes, 5 minutes to watch. I'll never understand it.