Travel Ninja Tactics: Can You Play Copyrighted Music To Stay Out of Livestreams?

by Ryan Vagabundo

So let's say you travel in areas that are full of tourists, which means areas full of people filming videos and livestreams. Some of which can get aggressively obnoxious, and you'd rather not be a part of them.

Can you blast some copyrighted music as a means of keeping yourself out of them?

This might seem like a very random pairing of thoughts at first glance, but here's the theory: most of the major video-hosting platforms, like YouTube and Twitch and TikTok, have algorithms that constantly trawl the site's videos looking for copyright violations. For example, they automatically pattern-match songs to see if someone is using someone else's music without permission. When these incidents are found, the user who posted them usually gets a "copyright strike" and is forced to remove or edit the video. Enough copyright strikes and they can even be banned from the platform.

So if the video picks up your copyright music well enough, it could trip the algorithms, in turn forcing the offending party to remove or edit you out of the video. You also may not need to rely on the algorithm if you can identify the filmer; you could just go to their account later and flag it / file a complaint for use of copyrighted material.

This might also at first seem like an incredibly dickish and petty thing to do. However, if you've ever had someone randomly try to involve you in their amateur Impractical Jokers antics out in shared public spaces, you'll understand where this feeling comes from. People do all sorts of stupid and thoughtless things to strangers for social media clout these days.

This idea actually comes to us from the Los Angeles police, of all places. Some literal Beverly Hills Cops tried this technique as a means of avoiding being filmed in 2020 and early 2021.

The main problem with this tactic is that platforms seem to have a high tolerance for background music if it isn't a featured part of the video. If it's just one song in the video that's questionable, it generally needs to be playing for at least a full minute before the algorithm flags start flying.

Police seem to think this is an effective technique, however, apparently continuing to spread it through private channels through 2021. JDSupra, a source of serious legal analysis, actually took on this issue in July and determined that while it may well work initially it could also be challenged by the video filmer on fair use grounds.

But while platforms might feel sympathetic to someone recording a police interaction, they might not feel so charitable (and devote so much attention) to someone's stupid prank videos that already contain iffy content and pose a potential PR headache for them anyway.

So yes, though it can hardly be considered reliable and probably involves you getting at least a solid minute of good loud music in, it appears this technique might actually work.

At the very least, you might ruin their stupid nonsense with a healthy dose of Baby Shark or Nickelback!