This encourages self-censorship, or what's called "anticipatory obedience".

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.

During the George Floyd death, the only place I could find the entire unedited footage was on liveleak, including when Floyd got into and subsequently out of the police cruiser. Nowhere else could I find that, and wondered why such an important event, triggering such outrage - didn’t have all the video available for everyone to view. A cynical person would suggest that the entire unedited footage conflicted with whatever narrative the media was pushing at the time.

Talk about anticipatory obedience, read the rest of this thread. oof.

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.

Right. A business is using the logos of other businesses to advertise their business…those vehicles are directly the subject of the video. That’s not allowed; it doesn’t make it not the case simply by the location filmed. Put it this way, I make a video and say my restaurant is great because restaurant B gets low health scores, then I plaster restaurant B’s logo all over my video to advertise my own business. Why would the fact that I stood on a public sidewalk make a difference?

(Note: I’m only talking about your described example.)

If the intention of the videos is to cover the process of towing the cars in general, then there is no need to include specific personally identifiable information, so removing those details seems quite reasonable to me.

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.

I wonder when people in the west will start flocking to Telegram groups (or equivalent) to get the real information the way they do elsewhere.