I mean, if I were a business open to the public, playing music without paying the fees, I'd get in trouble. Here we have police business, open to the public, playing music, pressumably without paying the fees. Especially, if the officer is doing it when they know a recording is being made, that's an intentional act of public performance, or facilitating copying or somesuch prohibited conduct with copyrighted materials.
Also, depending on the volume, could be violating a noise ordinance.
Public performance isn't really some random law pulled out of the aether. It's one of the basic tenets of copyright and serves as the basis for the majority of copyright licensing in the U.S. Even the take-down process that the officer is looking to exploit exists because of the the rights holder's right to public performance (an Instagram video is a public performance).
That it is illegal (criminal) to willfully perform a copyrighted work in public is well established law and not the least bit random.
The point being that no rights holder, in their right mind would prospect someone for this, in the same way that they don't go after people walking around with boomboxes.
There might be a crazy example if this happening once. But mostly nobody gets prosecuted for walking around playing music on their phone.
As in, maybe there has been 1 or 2 times, in history, where a court has ever punished anyone, for merely walking around, playing music on their phone, if it has ever happened at all.
> there are plenty of bands that would be happy
And the band would waste a lot of money and lose in court doing that.
I am truly curious as to how far you actually think this goes. As in, do you truly believe, that, to give a more extreme example, if someone was walking around, and had headsets in, and was listen to music but someone walking next to them could hear it, that any court ever would call this a public performance?
I mean someone can hear it right? That makes it a public performance? No. That is ridiculous. This would never happen.
Because that is only a slightly more extreme situation.
Copywrite law would be completely meaningless, if you are willing to bit the bullet on these kinds of extreme hypotheticals.
In your headphone example, I'd say it's pretty clear that this would not be a public performance. Let's approach the problem from the other direction. If you have a store and play music over speakers in the store then this does count and stores pay licensing fees for this. What about if an employee regularly plays music with a bluetooth speaker while they're working at the cash register? This is a representative of the company playing music where customers can hear it so you could argue it still counts. What if they don't use the speaker and play the music directly over their phone's speakers? Does the quality of the speakers matter? What if instead of a store it's a government employee working somewhere like the DMV? Is the government exempt from copyright laws? What's the difference between the DMV employee and a cop? They both work for the government, doing a job where they interact with the public, and are playing music over speakers where the public around them can hear it.
At what point in that series does it stop being a public performance? Where exactly does the law draw the line? Is there even a clear line in established case law? Does that precedent vary depending on your location in the US? I would be surprised if there is relevant precedent for this example. There wouldn't normally be any incentive for anyone in the music industry to claim this type of scenario is a public performance. However, I think that changes when the police start doing this to as a way to avoid criticism.
No more or less terrible than automatically removing the video of the officer is. It's the same law! If it's unethical to prevent an officer from playing music it's equally unethical to exploit someone else's enforcement of that law for reasons that have nothing to do with playing music.
Oh as I mentioned in a different comment I think this should be illegal and might already be illegal - but pulling some rando law out of the aether to force the charge isn't a great tactic.
Edit: Just to clarify, one of the other reasons I'm skeptical of using copyright law for this is because the intent doesn't match what the officer's intent would be allowing for officers to have a pretty good chance of avoiding any repercussions and because the penalties of sentencing are inappropriate. There are existing legal recourses in most instances for restricting the ability for civilians to record police incidents - if an officer is abusing copyright law to accomplish this silencing then they are likely running afoul of those laws and should be sentenced with breaking those laws since the penalties are more appropriate.
1. I'm going to guess it has happened sometime because racism, but it really shouldn't be. And thankfully a quick googling didn't turn up a litany of results.