NOSFERATU, premiered MARCH 4, 1922 • dir. F. W. Murnau, screenplay by Henrik Galeen, design by Albin Grau; starring Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder.
Remember back in Feb ’21, when cops in Beverly Hills were caught blaring Taylor Swift songs to prevent videos of their misconduct from being posted to social media by triggering copyright filters?
At the time, the Beverly Hills PD was publicly shocked and appalled by the conduct and promised to root it out. Other police departments didn’t get the memo. One county over, in Santa Ana, cops spent Monday night blaring Disney tunes out of their cruiser in an (unsuccessful) bid to keep themselves off Youtube:
The officer — an SAPD corporal, badge 3134 — woke the sleeping residents of W Civic Center Dr and N Western Ave at 11 p.m., and kept the Disney tunes going for hours until a resident — who was also a Santa Ana city councilor — confronted him.
Councilmember Jonathan Hernandez asked the officer why he was playing Disney music. The officer answered “Because they get copyright infringement,” meaning Youtubers who post videos in which cops play copyrighted music.
Local residents — who wouldn’t go on record because they feared retaliation — told Jessica De Nova for ABC7 that this was a recurring nuisance on their street, with cops routinely playing music to forestall videos of their conduct.
These dirty cops are relying on Youtube’s automated filters, which robotically remove content that matches materials that have been identified as copyrighted works. These has made it effectively impossible for classical musicians to post their own piano recitals of public domain works. Companies have claimed white noise, bird-song, and silence as copyrighted works, with no consequences for overreach.
Incredibly, the US Copyright Office floated a proposal late last year to make these filters mandatory for all platforms:
After getting an earful about the idiocy of this measure, they backed off. But Congress stepped in to fill the idiocy gap, with Senators Leahy and Tillis introducing the SMART Act, which revives the idea of making these filters mandatory for all online speech:
As my EFF colleague Katharine Trendacosta writes, this won’t just make all our online speech more brittle and easily censored, but it also has grave implications for the ability of independent online creators to pay their bills:
In 1859, while exploring the remote island of Bacan in the North Moluccas, Indonesia, the renowned naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace made an astounding discovery: the Megachile pluto — the world’s largest bee.
Wallace described the bee, which is about four times the size of a honeybee, as a “large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle.” But for more than a century, that was the only known sighting of the Megachile pluto, and some feared that deforestation had rendered the giant insect extinct.
“It was absolutely breathtaking to see this ‘flying bulldog’ of an insect that we weren’t sure existed any more,” Clay Bolt, the photographer who captured the first images of the species alive, told the BBC. “To actually see how beautiful and big the species is in life, to hear the sound of its giant wings thrumming as it flew past my head, was just incredible.”
