A new video shows Beverly Hills cops playing the Beatles to trigger Instagram's algorithmic copyright filter, raising concerns that some law enforcement are using copyright takedowns to prevent videos from circulating online. In their coverage of the issue, Vice notes that Adam Holland, Project Manager for Lumen, and Nick Simmons, a Research Assistant, predicted that copyright could be weaponized by police, noting that music in videos filmed at Black Lives Matter protests had repeatedly resulted in them being removed from social media sites on copyright grounds.
"Law enforcement, or indeed anyone of any ideological persuasion who was seeking to prevent videos of a particular event from being shared online, need only make sure that copyrighted audio is present with sufficiently recognizable clarity and volume in the background of a protest or other event," they wrote in a blog post last year. "A chilling prospect indeed."
