Taking Videos of Police Operations – An interference with the rights of police officers?

17 October 2019 – need2know

Our Partner Sonja Dürager, specialised amongst others in IT-law, trademark, copyright, data protection, and unfair competition, wrote an article in German: Taking Videos of Police Operations – An interference with the rights of police officers?

It is the spirit of our time to take photos of everything and everyone at every more or less interesting event and to distribute them on various platforms. Private recordings of police deployments also belong to it. What was previously reserved for the police using bodycams in case of need, now also reaches the hobby photographer. For proof purposes with critical situations this is comprehensible.  If the motives lie however only in the satisfaction of the sensationalism of the Youtube Community, this seems to be questionable opposite the individual policemen due to privacy related aspects. Recently, the Austrian Supreme Court had to assess such a situation (Supreme Court 27.6.2019, 6 Ob 6/19d), and decided that the recording as such was admissible, especially since the state authority would have to reckon with the fact that police force would be documented, but the publication violates the policeman’s right to his own image according to Section 78 UrhG.

Full Article in German

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