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Police Restrict Public Photography
An anonymous reader writes "News.com is reporting that in Australia, recent attempts by a photo club to take pictures of industrial installations was met with police resistance. From the article: 'Club member Hans Kawitski was told not to photograph industrial installations and was ordered to inform members of the camera club to follow his lead. Liberty Victoria said its advice to photographers would be to ignore the directive. "The police have got no place making such warnings," president Brian Walters SC said.'"
... but CCTV is fine. Mmmm, double standards.
Club member Hans Kawitski was told not to photograph industrial installations and was ordered to inform members of the camera club to follow his lead.
They should just stick to the upskirt pics. That's not illegal in most places.
Not sure which makes more sense though.
If it's the government or some corporation, it's good. If it's you, it's bad.
For other examples, look at rootkits, spying, lying... the list goes on.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We've got to stop and ask ourselves 'How many photographs do we need?'
Trust me, I work for the government.
You are correct that the shopping centre is private property, but incorrect that this means you cannot take photos there without the property owner's permission (I am going to make a huge punt and guess you are not an expert in Australian law)
This wiki has a reasonablly good explanation:As much as the shopping center operaters would love to control everything, they opeate a public space.
That the article fails to mention the difference between photots inside someone's property, and from outside the property, is poor journalism.
What you fail to mention is that US!=The rest of the world. Things work differently in Australia.
My pics.
When I was photographing the beautiful old federal buildings in downtown Denver (probably about 3 years ago), a federal officer pulled up and told me to stop taking pictures. When I asked him what law I was breaking, he refused to answer, but demanded my ID and told me I was now going to have a "record with the FBI." When I then asked him for his name and/or badge number, he got back in his car and drove away.
Luckily, mine had a happier ending then this guy.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Speaking as a freelance photographer, things are worse than people think. Not only can you not sell, but nobody will help you to publish such photos. It wasn't too many years ago that any photo except those that were truly "private" could be taken and used, if for nothing else than at least for documentary purposes.
...and any representation of anything or anyone, anywhere, is subject to lawsuit unless you have their name, signature, and fingerprints signing off on it. No wonder the news media never gets into real issues anymore. The list of things they can't discuss/photograph without permission of "the owners" under penalty of endless lawsuits and liability is virtually endless. And thus, they're left photographing/describing those people that WANT to be publicized (i.e. endless human interest and movie-star footage and news).
Now, however, the list of things that nobody will buy and nobody will publish (printers even refuse to handle these if you try to self-publish books or similar works) includes:
- Any person (unless model contract is present, even if it's YOU!)
- Any item (unless property contract is present, even if it's YOURS!)
- Any building, patch of land, or piece of water (see previous item.)
- Any manufactured item (because industrial design = intellectual property.)
So, a partial list of things that can't be photographed without a contract on file includes: all people, all property (if it's not owned by the government, it's private and needs a signed release; if it's owned by the government, it's too dangerous to shoot or use anyway), all places (nearly all land and half the water in the world is owned by individuals or nations), all manufactured items (because all of them had to be designed by someone, and such design is intellectual property -- even things like soap bars with logos washed off them or empty containers without labels), all logos, text, phrases on signs, etc. (because thanks to copyright law, any piece of writing created by anyone is copyright by them, even if only three or four words long and done in graffiti in a public place).
I think stock and editorial photographers are probably more aware than most of just how much intellectual property now affects our culture/society. Take a picture of a graffiti-covered shed in the middle of nowhere? You need a signed release from the shed manufacturer (for the industrial design), the owner of the land (for property release), and the graffiti "artist" (for text release). You basically need 2-3 signed contracts for EVERY PICTURE YOU TAKE, even of a ping-pong ball from the back floating in your own bathtub in the dark, because of all the intellectual and real property (and thus potential liability) involved in every photograph of everything.
Basically:
- Take a world in which ALL things are owned by SOMEBODY
- and add intellectual property on top of physical property
- and add a culture of litigation
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Okay, let's assume for a minute that the article supports your statement that "some cops just warned them" or that you merely forgot to cite a secondary source which includes this information.
You're okay with the police "just warning" people not do things they have every legal right to do, even though doing those things won't cause anyone any harm? What exactly are they warning them about then? A warning implies a threat, and in the lack of any other threat, whose left but the very police doing the warning? That's intimidation.
You seem to be arguing that just because the police can't legally stop people from taking the photographs that it isn't a "ban" or "restriction". It certainly sounds like they're trying to restrict people to me. They're just not doing so legally and their reasons are unclear.
And, by the way, there are plenty of "damn things" the police can do if you don't cooperate - especially if they're corrupt.
Unfortunately this is all too common these days. Everyone with a camera is automatically a paedophile or a terrorist (more even more.
However they still ask the public for photographs when it suits them.
He should have called the police, filed a report for false arrest and sued the company for destruction of property.
The actions of a private security force are not the responsibility of the government, and they are restricted by the same laws as the rest of us. This isn't the government cracking down on terrorist bogeymen, this is a private security force that needs to be informed they aren't cops.
Learn your rights, and stand up for them.
Now this is, of course, assuming your friend wasn't doing something illegal while taking the pictures like tresspassing, which is illegal and would get him in trouble. This would actually be what I would suspect, given my past experiences with such things. I've had a number of "rent-a-cops breaking the law" stories related to me in my life, most in person. Initally, it always sounds like the security force was in the wrong and, of course, I advocate standing up for one's rights as always. However it then usually comes out that the person involved was doing something they shouldn't have: Tresspassing, shoplifting, whatever.
Either way, my advice for the future: If private security tells you to stop taking pictures while you are on public land, tell them to get lost (do make sure you are on public land, not their property). If they try to detain you, get your cell phone out and threaten to call the police, while backing away. If they push the issue, make the call. If they do detain you and take your property, file a police report, and contact a lawyer about a civil suti. It IS illegal.
Security forces can temporarily detain a person only under very limited circumstances, such as if they are on the private property they are hired to protect, and they have witnessed the person comitting an illegal act (like shoplifting). Otherwise, they are just civilians in a silly uniform. If they try to grab you for something like taking photos on a public street, they'll lose their jobs at the very least.
Prior to WWII, back when Russia and Germany had relatively friendly relations, a lot of German 'tourists' visited the USSR and had their photographs taken by various strategic landmarks, such as bridges and tunnels. The photographs intentionally included the nearby signs, which provided important parameters such as clearance and maximum allowable load. Once this information was systematically compiled, the Germans had an unprecedented knowledge of their future enemy's infrastructure, enabling them to plan troop and weapon deployments with an incredible level of detail.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
Because if it was private security, the first thing your friend should have done was call the police and have the security guards arrested for theft and/or destruction of personal property. It is not legal for them to do that. They can ask you to stop taking pictures and if you actually are on their property then you must comply, but they cannot take your film. Well, at least not without a court order.
Check out the Photographer's Right.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
And having gotten you to the station, they can take a DNA sample, which they keep even if they subsequently release you without charge.
When an official lies to the public, it is patriotism. When the public lies to an official, it is perjury.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
A few weeks ago I was on vacation and visiting one of the more beautiful suspension bridges in the states. I was using a consumer style digital camera to hopefully get a decent shot for home use. After shooting the bridge and other good angles for maybe 30 minutes from a nearby park area, the local police arrived. They told me that photographing the bridge is "strongly discouraged." I looked at them like they were on crack, and they added, "for national security reasons." To their credit, they were very polite and seemed somewhat uncomfortable with their new job of keeping the world safe from photos.
The bridge had a new lighting system specifically made for aesthetic purposes, funded by donations from the public over the last couple decades, and this is the fruit of those efforts.
I'm too young to feel this damn old. I remember when this kind of bullshit was for those countries that didn't have freedom like the US. When I was in elementary school (in the 1980s), this would have been a scary story about the USSR or Nazi-era Germany, but unthinkable for the "land of the free." I hope to hell that the warning klaxons were louder than this for the Germans 70 or so years back. I'd rather be overly paranoid and bent about the issue than just plain correctly worried. Planet-wide and synchronized, this shit is making me ill.
Last summer, I was harassed for taking pictures of city buses in Ottawa (federal capital of Canada). Here's my account of the... incident:
I was being hassled by OC transpo security types for taking pictures of buses in the street.
One of them, a woman, was practically in tears about "don't you know what happenned in London", just as if photographing buses would make them blow-up. Poor little creature. I almost wanted to hug her to calm her fears (but she looked too much like whe queen of England and I didn't want to smear myself)...
The whole thing got ugly when they demanded to see some identification; I refused flatly, on matters of principle. Nothing illegal was done; then we went through the usual "if you don't have nothing to hide, why don't you give us some ID" bullshit arguments we always hear.
They then said that they would have to call the police on me.
-- Are you arresting me? I asked.
-- No, you're free to leave.
**BINGO!**
This was a dead giveaway that they are security types, not constables. They cannot arrest and detain somebody for nothing...
So I left at once; but less than a block away, I was intercepted by a fuming policewoman whose demeanor was quite arrogant and disgusting. She neatly parked her car blocking the reserved bus lane on Albert, between Bronson and Commissionners street, a most inconvenient place for buses, right as rush-hour was beginning.
As I was walking calmly, she started to yell at me:
-- "Hey, buddy"!!!
Well, I'm sorry, but that's not a very polite way to introduce yourself. So I ignore her and keep walking slowly up the hill. That girl has to be taught a lesson in respect.
She caught up on me right when I was about to arrive to where I was staying. Never before I have seen such a tremenduous display of fury and nastyness. 120 pounds and 120 decibels of pure, hot and tanned unadulterated flaming bitch. She would be perfect on ALT.FLAME.
She was yelling at me, demanding to see identification.
-- Are you arresting me? I asked again.
-- No, I am detaining you.
Not to take chances (what the fuck "detaining" legally means???), I started to dole out information on a piecemeal basis; like a Québec birth certificate, a perfectly legal, yet totally unknown document.
-- You don't have anything with your address? she hysterically blurted, expecting the standard, run-of-the-mill sacrosanct driver's license, which I don't have...
-- This is all I have (heavily implying "this is all you'll get").
As we argued, three transit security types came about (including the slimy one who said that "I can leave", but the sad girl was gone, though), as well as two city cops came to watch the fun go by.
The two cops (guys) were much nicer (which is easy to do, given the terminal nastyness of the first - I guess even Genghis Khan would seem nice compared to her).
She then asks me for my address. Just as I finish saying the number and the street, before I say "Montréal", she disgustingly blurts out "is this in Gatineau???", like if I was living in a toilet bowl.
As I said "No, Montréal", she demanded my address in Ottawa. So I gave her my friend's address, not wanting to be arrested on charges of homelessness (you never know what slimy dirty trick the pigs will pull on you - during all that time, I carefully stayed on the sidewalk alignment so I would not be charged for trespassing), some 20 feet away - because of this, my friend got in trouble; he was told by his condo administrators that he was "put on probation for bringing-in people who cause trouble", as the whole scene was witnessed by about 30 construction workers working on the condo... But this is a matter for his lawyer, though, and not on topic here.
-- "It's right there, pointing at the condo main door"
-- "I don't believe you, you just made that up!!!!" then blared out of the high-pitched decibel emitter. I suppose I could have borrowed some earplugs from nearb