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.

> This is about a government created footage from a surveillance camera. Copyright, or any other notion of imaginary property, most certainly does not apply.

That is incorrect. Copyright generally does not attach to works created by federal government agencies. The same is not true for works created by state and other sub-national government entities.

Harvard has an online resource center where you can learn more about this.

See https://copyright.lib.harvard.edu/states/

I do think it’s true that this particular footage is in the public domain.

>It's essentially a public record, and FOIA likely does apply (as noted by one tiny comment).

FOIA does not apply to MWAA records. MWAA has its own access to public records policy that applies to its records. I have the unfortunate privilege of being a quasi-expert at dealing with MWAA and its records. I am one of three people to have ever appealed a MWAA Freedom of Information Policy all the way to arbitration.

(Bizarrely, binding arbitration is a requester’s final recourse. Unlike every other government entity that I know of, litigation is not an option if you think MWAA has not followed their Freedom of Information Policy.)

See https://www.mwaa.com/sites/mwaa.com/files/legacyfiles/freedo...

It is, in its most true form, a modern-day sefdom, bound by soft power, hopelessness, and above all else an unquenchable aversion to risk. The risk part predicated upon the delusion that we are in end times and things couldn't be better, so don't rock that boat. It appropriately fills the void that religion used to.