City May Seek Permit and Insurance for Many Kinds of Public Photography
Some tourists, amateur photographers, even would-be filmmakers hoping to make it big on YouTube could soon be forced to obtain a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance before taking pictures or filming on city property, including sidewalks.
Context & Ripple Effects
The permit-and-insurance idea is floated, not adopted — the relationship record marks it 'rumored' — but it lands in the same week the amateur-video boom became measurable. YouTube crossed 20 million U.S. unique visitors on June 20, Hitwise put its share of U.S. visits up 70% between January and May 2007, and the site hit its announced June date for mobile streaming on the 18th. The raw material for all of it is exactly what the city proposes to license: people pointing cameras at streets.
June's other YouTube news frames the stake. Since March the You Choose '08 hub has connected presidential candidates to voters through online video, and on June 24 a spurned 'Die Hard' parody returned to the site after a takedown fight — evidence both of YouTube's cultural reach and of how contested control over uploaded footage already is. A $1 million liability floor would decide who can afford to feed that pipeline from public ground.
First-order effects
- Tourists, hobbyists, and aspiring YouTube filmmakers would need a city permit plus $1 million in liability coverage to shoot on any city property, including sidewalks — a cost bar only insured production outfits clear, pushing casual shooting off public land or underground.
Second-order effects
- YouTube, drawing its supply from precisely this kind of street-level footage during its fastest measured growth, faces a thinner contributor base in New York unless the rule is narrowed; the city effectively becomes a tollbooth on its content acquisition.
- Insurers and brokers gain a new market of million-dollar policies pitched at weekend shooters, and whoever sells that coverage cheapest becomes a de facto gatekeeper on who films in public.
Third-order effects
- If other municipalities copy the template, camera access to public space becomes a licensed activity — shifting citizen media toward private property and credentialed productions, and relocating editorial power over what gets filmed from the shooter to the permitting office.
The trend: As user-generated video matures into mass media, city governments are beginning to price and regulate the public spaces that feed it.