1st Circuit Rules Public Has Right to Videotape Police

In a resounding affirmation of the First Amendment, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that members of the public have a constitutionally protected right to videotape police carrying out their duties in public. Media Law reports.

The ruling comes in the case of Simon Glik, a Russian-born, Boston lawyer. In 2007, while walking through Boston Common, Glik saw a teenager being arrested by Boston police. After he took out his cell phone and began recording the arrest, the police arrested him for violating the Massachusetts wiretap law, a broadly written law that makes it a crime to intercept "any wire or oral communication."

After a state court judge dismissed all the charges against him, Glik filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court against the police officers who arrested him and the City of Boston. The defendants asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit based on their qualified immunity from lawsuits as police officers acting within the scope of their duties. The trial judge refused to dismiss the case and the defendants appealed to the 1st Circuit.

Read full article.

Vladimir Putin's New Arch Enemy: YouTube

As more details emerge about the very messy, probably corrupt Russian election, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is calling for a full investigation, and believe it or not, YouTube might be the best place to look for evidence. The Atlantic Wire reports.

Thanks to a coordinated effort by both amateur and professional election monitors, the site is packed with clips that appear to catch officials in the act of everything from changing votes after they've been submitted to stuffing ballot boxes, literally.

President Dmitry Medvedev denies the videos actually show voter fraud. But the clips have gone viral, and they're not exactly calming down the thousands of angry Russians who've taken to the streets to protest government corruption.

It's difficult to tell whether the YouTube voter fraud videos come from coordinated election monitoring efforts or simply concerned citizens with smartphones. With view counts now peaking in the millions, though, it also doesn't really matter.

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Social media influences documentary-makers

With built-in video cameras now the norm for mobile phones, anyone can be a film-maker – a fact proven by the role social content played in TV news coverage of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. As the dust settles, however, social media is influencing documentary-makers, too. The Guardian reports.

Social media is an enabler – allowing people to communicate in states where repressive regimes have restricted them from doing so," says David Alamouti, a film-maker and development director of inSight Education, a not-for-profit organisation championing diversity in production. "Now, however, it is also re-writing the conventions of documentary – fuelling the development of a new style as surely as the advent of TV re-shaped the documentary film-making that existed before."

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This Is The Police: Put Down Your Camera

With more than 280 million cellphone subscribers in the U.S., and many of those phones can record video, clashes between police and would-be videographers may be inevitable. npr reports on the rights of ciitizens to film an arrest, and the officers' rights to privacy.

Related:

-- The Rules And Your Rights For Recording Arrests

-- Woman Who Photographed Cops Got Beatdown, Files $24 Million Lawsuit

-- New Haven policy: Ok for citizens to film police making arrests

-- Recording a Police Officer Could Get You 15 Years in Jail in Illinois

-- The Huffington Post looks back on several case between police officers and civilians who record them.

US Lawmaker seeks ban on cell phone photos of accidents - while driving

Pantagraph reports that a Belleville lawmaker wants to prevent people from taking cell phone photographs or videos of accidents while driving.

State Rep. Thomas Holbrook, a Democrat, is sponsoring legislation that would prohibit people from using cell phones to snap photos or shoot video within 500 feet of emergency scenes.

Holbrook said this behavior interferes with emergency personnel.

The House Transportation Committee approved the measure without opposition Wednesday, and now it will go to the House floor.

The legislation is House Bill 1984:

Amends the Illinois Vehicle Code. Provides that no person may use a wireless telephone while operating a motor vehicle within 500 feet of an emergency scene except for specified purposes. Adds digital photographs and video to the definition of "electronic message" in provisions prohibiting the use of electronic communication devices while operating a motor vehicle. Effective immediately.

YouTube Video of Protests in Egypt

Despite apparent efforts by the government to disrupt communications among the protesters — some of whom responded to a call to protest posted on Facebook — by blocking mobile phone service and access to Twitter, many participants and observers managed to post accounts, images and video of the demonstrations online.

Read full article in The Lede.

YouTube Trends Catches Moscow Airport Bombing Aftermath

YouTube's new Trends channel has posted video of the immediate aftermath of the bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo airport yesterday morning, which officials are calling a terror attack. The death toll as of the time of this post was more than 30 people. The New York Times, Drudge Report, and other promiment media are already linking to the video below. Could Trends be turning into a hub for breaking news video?

[via FastCompany]

With Video Everywhere, Stark Evidence Is on Trial

An interesting article in The New York Times, on how the courtroom experience is becoming a lot more complicated because we now live in a world that is always on camera.

Legal experts say the technology shift could lead to harsher experiences for jurors, and could put pressure on judges to re-examine the balancing act that they have long used to determine what kind of evidence makes its way into court.

Read full article.

Egypt Police seize video footage, mobile phones to remove all traces of repression

The violence used by the police in an attempt to suppress any visual record of this demonstration was particularly disturbing,” Reporters Without Borders said to Ikhwan Web.

... Al Jazeera TV’s Cairo bureau chief, Hussein Abdel Ghani, told Agence France-Presse that his cameramen were searched and their video footage was confiscated. Many demonstrators said the mobile phones they had used to take photos or record video were also confiscated.

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Ahmadinejad's Fear of the Internet

Iran's rulers are afraid of the Net because it's being used to organize resistance. Western media also rely on it to get news out of the country. Business Week reports.

... So far there has been very little discussion about the authenticity of the images, like that which took place in connection with the riots in Tibet in early 2008. Nevertheless, the photos and videos from Iranian demonstrators' mobile phone cameras exhibit familiar problems: It is sometimes difficult to see where the footage was shot and what exactly is going on.

The entire international media are now relying on material from amateur sources—material which was once viewed with much skepticism—because there are hardly any other images coming out of the country and the world is desperate to see what is happening on the ground.

Admittedly photo agencies have already been using amateur shots for some time. Reuters, for example, operates the platform YouWitness, while Getty Images recently teamed up with Flickr, the mother of all photo platforms. Photo agencies using amateur pictures generally take great pains to make sure that the photographers are really who they say they are, and that the picture actually shows what it claims to be showing. This makes the agencies more reliable—but also much slower. Compared to the overflowing sources of the so-called social media, fact-checked news appears to be moving in slow motion.

Read full article.

CBS Launches Citizen Journalism Site For Mobile

CBS News has quietly launched CBS imobile, a citizen journalism site, where users can upload photos and videos directly from their mobile phone, for everyone to see.

[via mocoNews.net]

Mobile Junk 20

Beginning today, VH1 Mobile will offer "Mobile Junk 20," a new mobile application that gives users the ability to upload video and photos taken with their mobile devices.

Sprint is the first carrier to offer the application and Sprint customers can download the application via their phones, at www.sprint.com/digitalloungeor by texting "junk" to short code 2323.

Content submitted using the new application will be considered for inclusion in future episodes of the TV show "Web Junk 20."

Web Junk 20 is a 2006 program in which VH1 and iFilm collaborate to highlight the twenty funniest and most interesting clips collected from the Internet that week.

[Press release]

Police: Amateur videos often incomplete, unfair

A thoughtful piece by the AP on how a tiny part of an event - shot on film - can't tell the whole story and cites the resent examples of police brutality (UCLA student tasered by police) taped by citizens armed with cameraphones - but do serve to keep the police on it's toes.

"Amateur videos of police using force on suspects have sparked varying degrees of outrage from California to Philadelphia and Europe after onlookers captured incidents on cheap cameras or video cell phones and posted footage on the Internet.

Some law enforcement officials worry about the effect, arguing that footage notable leaves out what happened before the tapping. They also fear widespread exposure of such video clips might give officers pause in the future, even when force is justified, and that could put people in danger.

... Civil rights attorney Connie Rice acknowledges the images may "polarize and politicize police investigations," but she said they also force the LAPD to look inward. "Without them, there is no pressure at all for police to examine use of force, and they are not policing themselves," said Rice, who was appointed by the Police Commission to examine the LAPD's response to allegations of officer abuse. "

Image from truthdig.

The word: Sousveillance

New scientist reports on sousveillance.

"... Sousveillance is a French play on the word surveillance. Literally, it means "watching from below", while all those surveillance cameras in shopping centres and railway stations watch you from above. Sousveillance is the democratic version of the surveillance culture: the watched are turning cameras on the watchers.

One of the first to use the term was Steve Mann, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, Canada, and co-author of Cyborg.

Image left: Sousveillance as a situationist critique of surveillance. This wearable wireless webcam imitates surveillance cameras common in casinos and department stores. [via wikipedia]

Related:

-- Mobile Phone Sousveillance In Action Again

-- The Connected Camera Fights Back

VideoNewsCaster, a citizen journalist video broker

VideoNewsCaster.com is the latest agency offering to act as a gateway for citizen journalists, offering to broker any video clips which may contain interesting shots for news organizations to use. Though other agencies (listed below) accept videos along with camphone pictures, VideoNewsCaster is the first agency to position itself as a video broker.

Anyone with a video cell phone or camcorder that captures newsworthy video can submit the clip for free through www.videonewscaster.com, a Website with a growing database of over 500 local and national news organizations. [Press release]

Other such agencies:

-- Scoopt

-- SpyMedia

-- Cell Journalist

-- Splash News & Picture Agency

Mobile group in talks to create TV link for citizen journalists

Citizen journalism is poised to take a great leap into the mainstream media as the mobile phone network 3 pursues talks with ITN and Sky News about feeding clips produced by its customers on to television news bulletins, announces The Guardian.

"Clips from the public definitely add to the story," said a spokeswoman for Sky News. "The best you can get is TV footage that tells the story. The next best thing is citizen journalism where the cameras have not yet arrived or have not been. Some images are very, very powerful. Some of the images from inside the tunnels in the July 7 bombings, for instance, were very powerful."

The increasing use of the public as news gatherers will raise concerns about accuracy. It will be hard to verify clips from events that were not witnessed by others. Amateur photographers and camera operators have for years been claiming to have recorded the Loch Ness Monster and UFOs, and it will not be long before someone with a camera phone records such a sighting.

The rise of citizen journalism has called into question the future of traditional journalists and editors. Last month, however, the executive editor of Sky News wrote: "I happen to think there will still be a role for editors - not just to assess information, but also to prioritise and present it in a way which, as well as making the news understandable, also reinforces its importance and point. [This is] something an anything-goes citizen journalism blog can't do. Professional journalists will always need to decide if it's news or propaganda."

Picture all the news that's fit to upload

Since 3 launched See Me TV in October, it has had more than a million downloads a month, reports The Guardian.

"Now it is about to launch 24 Hours, claimed to be a "world first" service for would-be journalists that I have been testing. Its motto: "Break the news and spot celebs wherever you are and make money too."

... The point is that we are only at the start of what may turn out to be a grassroots revolution. It is rare for the average person to witness a major incident, but there will be hundreds of others there with cameraphones at the ready. As phones become more powerful and easier to use - so will photo-journalism improve."

Related: - See Me TV: the ultimate reality mobile TV channel

The rise of clip culture online

The popularity of the websites that allow people to share short video snippets is leading to the rise of a clip culture, according to internet law professor Michael Geist, reports the BBC - and it's spilling over from the Internet to cell phones.

... "The emergence of video sharing sites is yet another seemingly instant internet success story that has caught many by surprise.

The best of user-generated video today attracts large audiences and competes with anything being offered on the major networks.

... From a business perspective, media companies are being forced to grapple with the competitive threat of user-generated content and to determine how to address unauthorised sharing of their clips.

... Telecommunications companies and intransigent broadcasters face an even tougher choice, as their vision of an on-demand converged internet, must now compete with the clip culture.

This presents new challenges, since users are increasingly not satisfied with merely consuming content, but rather demand the ability to share and re-create it."

nanotv is requesting citizen video submissions

nanotv which offers video news bulletins by mobile phone twice a day over Swisscom's network, is requesting citizen video submissions, shot with digital cameras or cameraphones.

Related:

-- Online Agoravox will soon be showing cameraphone video clips submitted by citizen reporters

-- ABC requests citizen videos to enhance it's TV news program