In an ideal world, Taylor Swift is a mythical superhero, as she is every day to her massive legion of fans across the globe. So it’s understandable that news of her music being used against the public good has her fans in a hot summer rage on social media.
What has set them off is a video of a police officer admitting he plays her music to keep videos of police work off YouTube. In 2021, this is not a good look for any police force. For those unfamiliar with YouTube’s rules, the streaming service requires that if you are including copyrighted music in your video, you need to secure permission from every single party that is a copyright holder for the song in issue. With the bar set this high, the vast majority of people who upload to YouTube either choose not to use copyrighted music in their video or they soon find the video removed by YouTube staff.
So when a police officer pulls out their phone and plays not only copyrighted music, but music so popular and clearly identifiable as a Taylor Swift hit, the chances of YouTube’s people and machines catching it and taking it down are super high.
Charlie Cartwright, a South Florida lawyer, observes that while this is an effective strategy in a practical sense, it has fundamental flaws: “While playing copyrighted music in the course of police duties would technically be one way to have YouTube remove videos of police doing their work, this runs counter to both the spirit of YouTube’s terms of service and the greater good of public safety.”
Of course, in practical terms, there are ways to remove the copyrighted music from the video. Ricky Leighton, Head of Video Production at Esquire Digital, suggests it’s not difficult for an experienced hand to remove music from a video.
“To remove illegal music, you can use editing tools to either swap out the song or use a tool such as iMovie that so many of us have to remove the music before uploading it,” he explains. “You could also use a mobile video editing tool, just keep in mind that while just removing a song is easy, if you want to remove the song yet keep critically important dialogue, this is a much harder trick.”
With yet another person killed by police last night in Minneapolis – a horrible irony to the tragedy is that it was the uncle of the young woman who filed George Floyd’s killing – the last thing the police need in any American city is a public perception that they are trying to be cute with the public’s right to film them.
