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Tourist group, pianist argue over filming during public live-stream
A Chinese tourist group got into a heated confrontation with a British piano teacher over the pianist’s live-streaming in a public train station.
A British piano teacher’s caught-on-tape confrontation with people claiming to be associated with “Chinese TV”, and the subsequent dispute over the use of their images, has led to an international crash course in how privacy laws work around the world.
Brendan Kavanagh was livestreaming a performance at a public piano at the St. Pancras International station in London when he was approached by a group of people holding Chinese flags.
When he left the piano to approach the group, the video shows group members becoming aggressive and one person shouted at Kavanagh not to touch a woman with the group when he appeared to reach at the flag she was holding.
“I mean, I think the shouty guy was on some kind of ego trip,” Kavanagh told USA Today Friday. “Before he arrived, we’re all getting along great.”
British Transport Police intervened and an officer requests that Kavanagh not use the footage, “Because there’s money being made, they work for a company, and their faces can’t be shown on TV or somebody’s channel.”
“I had a tiny, tiny, tiny little taste of communist authoritarianism, which I’ve never experienced before,” Kavanagh said.
Cultural clash over rights
One of the persons, which USA Today could not independently verify as being connected with “Chinese TV,” says, “This is our right we are protecting and that’s it … image right. We are protecting our own image rights, you are not sharing.”
The Metropolitan Police’s website says, “Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel.”
Chinese law grants its citizens the legal right to their likeness but British law does not have an equivalent statute.
Livestream receives backlash
The video has received over 7.5 million views since it was streamed and Kavanagh said in a video posted Thursday that he has received privacy strikes on the video from YouTube.
Google, the parent company of YouTube, responded to a request for comment by pointing to the site’s privacy policy but did not make any statements about the video specifically.
“This is a classic Streisand effect video,” Kavanagh told Business Insider, referring to the phenomenon of information becoming more visible when it is attempted to be removed.
The group that approached Kavanagh received mockery on the Chinese social media site Weibo. “The biggest possibility is that these Chinese people don’t want to be found shopping in the old capitalist world,” a user with the screenname “King_Lear” wrote.