Group Recording and Consent

October 2nd, 2014
publicy, recording
It's common for progressive organizers to include sections in their code of conduct requiring consent for recording:
Be conscious of the need for consent for certain activities. Make sure you have consent before dancing with someone, dipping them, cuddling with them, making any form of sexual contact, taking their photograph, recording them, et cetera.
  — YDW code of conduct
Or:
Policy violations include: ... Non-consensual photography or recording
  — Oberlin Contra
I've written about this before with Youth Trad Song but after YDW the specific case of whole-group videos sticks out to me. For example, I'm really glad that someone captured the craziness of the contra-ECD-contra-ECD-...-ECD medley (part 1, part 2) and I wish there were similar videos of Money Musk and Softly Good Tummas. Similarly having this video [1] of the Free Raisins playing at the Dance Flurry let people who enjoyed dancing to us there being able to go home to their friends and say "listen to this band; can we book them?".

Making sure you have the consent of everyone in a large group is very hard, and none of these videos involved any sort of checking for consent. There were several times when I would have taken pictures or videos at YDW, but didn't because it was against the code of conduct. Do we just want to say "yes, dance organizations should ban group videos and pictures"? Or if we do want to allow these, what would be better code-of-conduct wording?


[1] In this case the person taking video did check with the band beforehand, but there was no annoucement or other way of checking with the dancers.

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