YouTube has become much worse about censorship. Pepe's Towing, LA's main towing company for major truck accidents, complains that YouTube took down some of their videos. Their videos are simply detailed coverage of the complex but effective process by which large vehicles that had accidents are lifted, rotated upright, placed on their wheels or on a large dolly as necessary, and towed away. Their people wear body cams, like cops, their cranes have cameras, and sometimes they use a DJI drone. (They bring out the drone when someone drives off an embankment and they need to plan a difficult lift.) The main purpose of all the video is to settle arguments with insurance companies over the cost of recovery. But they started a YouTube channel for PR purposes.
Almost all this video is taken on public property on LA county roads and freeways, with the cooperation of the cops, CALTRANS, local fire departments, and other organizations that clean up other people's messes. These are very public activities, with traffic streaming by and sometimes news helicopters hovering overhead. Totally First Amendment protected. Not a violation of YouTube's stated policies.
So what's the YouTube censorship about? Preventing corporate embarrassment. Their older videos have clear pictures of truck doors with ownership info. Container markings. License plates. Pictures of damaged goods. Now. out of fear of being cancelled by YouTube, they're blurring everything identifiable. Recently someone rolled over a semitrailer full of melons, and they blurred out not just the trucking company info, but the labels on the melons. Which the people from Pepe's say is silly, but they don't want to fight with YouTube.
This is about a government created footage from a surveillance camera. Copyright, or any other notion of imaginary property, most certainly does not apply. There are no financial damages. The video is not classified. It's essentially a public record, and FOIA likely does apply (as noted by one tiny comment). At best this is an internal policy violation that might possibly result in a termination for cause (although government employees tend to have more protections).
And yet people are still falling over themselves to reason that going against the desires of your employer must of course be illegal somehow. Not just written up per employer's policies, not just fired, not a civil suit if you've caused actual damage - but an escalation to criminal charges with the possibility of jail time, merely for not following an employer's whims. The degree to which we've already allowed top-down authoritarianism to infest our thinking is sickening.
And I think overbroad laws like the murderous CFAA have a lot to do with this. Rather than defining narrowly-scoped trespasses and a clear boundary where the rights of an individual end, they've entrenched draconian legal regimes that arbitrarily create harsh penalties. So the only way to avoid running afoul of them is to avoid upsetting anybody who might have the power to use them on you. Society has generalized this as top-down authoritarianism that flows along economic power relations, and it's sad.
That is incorrect. Copyright generally does not attach to works created by federal government agencies. The same is not true for works created by state and other sub-national government entities.
Harvard has an online resource center where you can learn more about this.
See https://copyright.lib.harvard.edu/states/
I do think it’s true that this particular footage is in the public domain.
>It's essentially a public record, and FOIA likely does apply (as noted by one tiny comment).
FOIA does not apply to MWAA records. MWAA has its own access to public records policy that applies to its records. I have the unfortunate privilege of being a quasi-expert at dealing with MWAA and its records. I am one of three people to have ever appealed a MWAA Freedom of Information Policy all the way to arbitration.
(Bizarrely, binding arbitration is a requester’s final recourse. Unlike every other government entity that I know of, litigation is not an option if you think MWAA has not followed their Freedom of Information Policy.)
See https://www.mwaa.com/sites/mwaa.com/files/legacyfiles/freedo...
(Note: I’m only talking about your described example.)
Your analogy misses the mark. A more appropriate analogy would be someone taking a promotional selfie while walking down the street, which includes businesses' signs in the background.
Regardless of Youtube's rules, this just seems like good practice. Surveys and opinion polls in newspapers and scientific research normally redact that sort of information, for example.
That said, I hate to break it to you, but there is no real question of 'when', or even 'if'. The general public simply does not care, no matter how much abuse they are subjected to by mainstream platform operators.
There will always be a minority who care enough to embrace decentralization, open source, good e2ee, but they are the exception to the vast majority, at least inside the US, who simply do not care enough to change their behavior.
What percentage of Americans do you think would voluntarily, permanently relinquish their own fourth amendment rights for $5000? Scary thought experiment when you recall studies that have found only two thirds of Americans can name all three branches of government, or that fewer than one in four can name any right secured by the first amendment other than freedom of speech.
The good thing is that Telegram is not American so you don't get this prude censorship BS that you get on American apps (show half a nipple and get banned). Especially in the LGBT groups this can be a problem but also in the makerspace one (one of our members really loves making certain toys lol). Of course actual porn is not ok but that's fine, we don't use it for that.
I also like that their premium subscription is super affordable, only 2€ per month (it's cheaper if you don't pay through the Apple/Google ripoff stores) and it offers a lot of cool and useful features like automatic translation and transcription (which actually works unlike WhatsApp's)
I'm really quite happy with it and on top of everything bots are a fully supported first class citizen there so you don't have to screw around with hacky code like with WhatsApp. I have several bots for myself. So if there's a feature I want that it doesn't have I can simply add it!
Stealing security camera footage and giving (or possibly selling) it is a problem. This article tries to make a case that the law applied wasn’t correct on somewhat pedantic terms, but I don’t know enough about the law to know if they have a point or not.
I do know, however, that if you take private data from your employer and leak it (or sell it) you’re not going to be on the right side of the law. I have a hard time buying this article’s point that it was just “violating company policy”
if you wrong your employer, for example by failing to do your job well, you are not a criminal to be prosecuted by the state. you may well deserve to lose that job though.
here, wronging your employer is considered a criminal act.
This is going out of one’s way to abuse the employer’s trust. Moreover, it’s stealing their stuff. If I take cash out of a till, my employer should have the option of pressing charges.
Where I agree with you is that this isn’t computer fraud and abuse. It’s closer to theft. The law used to prosecute should be more banal.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
If I were to copy the files on my work device and distribute them, I would be in violation of NDAs which could be pursued as civil offenses. If I didn’t have those NDAs, my employer could try and pursue something in court, along with firing me, but it wouldn’t be a straightforward suit.
None of these are (or at least, should be) criminal situations.
This is the most important bit. That journalist had one fucking job. Technically, their job was handed to them in a platter. Now their incompetence is going to cost someone else's livelihood and possibly, life. What a sad state of affairs.
But calling using your cell phone to video record a security monitor "computer fraud" and "trespass" is clearly ridiculous.
Also, if the defendant here is literally innocent (i.e. the statutory wording does not apply to his actions) and his lawyer still advised him to plead no contest, then he might have grounds for the conviction to be overturned. I remember that Subway Jared had some of his charges reversed because he was technically innocent of them, but his lawyer stated that he didn't check any of the evidence before recommending a guilty plea.
And, in a further ridiculous twist of justice, if the defendant pleads to something that isn't even a crime (e.g. the state simply made the statute up, or adjusted the wording so it wasn't what the law said), then you can't get that reversed if you knowingly plead to it. I remember cases where defendants pled guilty to non-crimes, but you're cooked at that point because you agreed to it.
The CFAA applies!
It’s like postal or wire fraud. You’re going to do it somehow in just about any possible crime. They’ll get you.
It wasn’t/shouldn’t have been a crime? They’ll get you anyway, if they want.
