That is an unnervingly good point. - Edit 1
Before modification by Joel at 03/02/2012 07:31:48 PM
To me, where there is good cause to videotape someone at work it is reasonable to do so, openly and with their knowledge. It seems common sense to videotape any actual official dealings with a criminal matter for the use of the court, prosecution and defense. I think videotaping someone throughout their entire work day is pushing it a bit, and I think keeping those 'tapes' beyond a reasonable time frame in the absence of specific reasonable cause is also treading dangerous water.
In any event, open filming implies consent. It is legitimate to film someone without consent in certain cases but that doesn't automatically mean distribution or storage is legit. No one has, IMHO, the right to complain about a cop filming them during an arrest or citation, and reciprocally the police do not have a right to complain about being filmed by that person or their companion or a bystander during that process so long as it isn't interfering with the arrest or the person isn't making a secret of it outside of a reasonable room for fear of repercussion for doing so. e.g. there isn't anything wrong with hitting the record button on your cell or whatever if the officer is, in your eyes and within reason, acting unprofessionally or threateningly. But going from that to Youtube is crossing a line, every bit as much as the police posting the vid to youtube would be. It should be presented as evidence through defense counsel. If one does feel it needs to be on TV, so to speak, then they should be going through a responsible media outlet that knows to blur identifying features and numbers of the people in the video. Same as my employer has a right to videotape me, with my consent [implied is acceptable if the camera is clearly visible] be that employer public or private. They do not have the right to show that on TV, or to a wide audience, without my specific consent, unless they have taken clear steps to guard my privacy, by blurring my face and any other identifiers that would allow for reasonably easy identification.
In any event, open filming implies consent. It is legitimate to film someone without consent in certain cases but that doesn't automatically mean distribution or storage is legit. No one has, IMHO, the right to complain about a cop filming them during an arrest or citation, and reciprocally the police do not have a right to complain about being filmed by that person or their companion or a bystander during that process so long as it isn't interfering with the arrest or the person isn't making a secret of it outside of a reasonable room for fear of repercussion for doing so. e.g. there isn't anything wrong with hitting the record button on your cell or whatever if the officer is, in your eyes and within reason, acting unprofessionally or threateningly. But going from that to Youtube is crossing a line, every bit as much as the police posting the vid to youtube would be. It should be presented as evidence through defense counsel. If one does feel it needs to be on TV, so to speak, then they should be going through a responsible media outlet that knows to blur identifying features and numbers of the people in the video. Same as my employer has a right to videotape me, with my consent [implied is acceptable if the camera is clearly visible] be that employer public or private. They do not have the right to show that on TV, or to a wide audience, without my specific consent, unless they have taken clear steps to guard my privacy, by blurring my face and any other identifiers that would allow for reasonably easy identification.
That is a reasonable position, and deals with rts concerns about millions of people persecuting accused cops, even seeking them out for that purpose, within hours of a YouTube video being posted. Whether accused of just policy violations or breaking actual laws, cops have as much right to the presumption of innocence as anyone else. More to the point, NO ONE should be subject to mob reprisal just for online accusations (which leads into your other point.)
In digging around to confirm cops turning off dashcams when they do not WANT witnesses remains a problem (which it evidently does,) I ran across the Wikipedia article on James Bulger. In re-reading THAT atrocity, I learned that, after the two kids convicted of his brutal murder reached majority and were released with new identities, some idiot uploaded the name and picture of a coworker he (falsely) identified as one of them, earning himself a conviction for endangering the mans life. Obviously, behavior like that should be discouraged, and doing so with legal penalties seems entirely justified. Sometimes I think "reckless endangerment" runs a close second to "miscellaneous" as the largest category. Digressing further, I am increasingly inclined to think Calvin may have been right about that "total depravity" thing.
Let me stress that's just my opinion by the way, and what follows is even more just my opinion. But cameras, and memory, and upload/download speeds are all only going to get easier and cheaper. People need to start considering, even if we must undo precedents, how we will act on things like privacy when within a relatively short window of time we will have reached a point where cameras and memory are so cheap and small that a person might simply record a 360° view of there every waking moment and store a lifetimes worth of data because cameras, batteries, and memory are so affordable and small that you can have them woven into every article of clothes and jewelry or even painted onto your fingernails for a few bucks, if for no better reason then that it makes it really easy to find your damn car keys or settle arguments about how many times you've taken out the trash this year with your wife. It's my opinion that when that happens, or hopefully prior, people will realize and legislate that while it might be acceptable to download anything with expectation of privacy, it will not be acceptable to upload information with expectation of privacy. In the same sense that you can't be held responsible for viewing a billboard of a naked person but can be for putting it up. The technical possibility of all of us living in one gigantic fishbowl is absolute, the handful of improvements necessary to go the next step for absurdly tiny and cheap cams with massive memory and stupid/easy functioning should be considered a given. I don't think this is a subject where we should be trying to piecemeal together laws as we go and end up with all sorts of conflicting or contradictory laws with lots of loopholes and to me it ties in with copyright infringement and piracy too. Not what do you have a right to view/hear/receive/download but what do you have a right to say/show/transmit/upload.
Like I say, unnervingly good point, both because such uncharted unbounded territory I can only guess at what would be the best comprehensive solution, and because I would be stunned if Congress does not attempt the patchwork spasmodic approach you rightly reject as ill conceived. Unfortunately, the gradual deliberative process that works so well for not proliferating a plethora of hastily enacted poorly thought out laws is horribly unsuited to adapting national policy to new technology at the rate the latter develops. It does seem hard to separate rights to upload from rights to download.
Of course, the way THAT debate has gone I almost would not be surprised if laws against uploading THEMSELVES became illegal.
Even though uploading rather than downloading pirated data is the real problem, downloaders are easier targets, and Big Media does not WANT to restrict the ability to disseminate mindless pablum—they just do not want to SHARE that ability. 
To be honest, I am still a bit preoccupied by how ridiculous it is to focus on Chinese piracy when that is such a tiny facet of Western business helping China loot the West and assume its political and strategic influence to an extent Mao could never have dreamed. All thanks to unregulated free trade allowing Western businesses to routinely do things in China that would get their boards of directors thrown in prison in the US or Europe (hence we must change those laws to "compete in the new global market."
) Yet all that enrichment is glorious—EXCEPT Chinese copyright infringement, which is somehow the seventh sign of the apocalypse. Like calling the cops 'cos someone stole your dope. 