Presented as a reductio at the end of the article:
It’s not illegal to film a murder.
It’s not illegal to possess a film of a murder.
But one has to wonder: What if it were? What if YouTube had a button for "Report Illegal" that forwarded the video to law enforcement, hid it, and cleared it from your cache? What if people who watched video evidence of a crime and didn't report it to the authorities were treated as just a little bit complicit? What if the media were prevented from broadcasting potentially titillating evidence of crime to the public, but had to leave its analysis up to the professionals?
Can we say categorically that that would be bad for our society?
Can we say categorically that that would be bad for our society?