The debate over the New York Mayor’s Office proposal to more strictly regulate public photography has hit a kind of a fever pitch over the last week. A week ago today,  a group called Picture NY (which includes filmmaker Jem Cohen) organized a rally in downtown Manhattan that got quite a bit of local news attention. Around the same time, web comedy troupe Olde English released a protest video, done in the style of early-90s soft-rap. The clip seems to be on its way to viral classic status; since I wrote about it here at the beginning of the week, it’s been viewed about 13,000 times on SuperDeluxe, seemingly without any kind of formal promotion from the site. It’s super-broad and hyperbolic, but sadly, I think a case could be made that political media needs to be both in order to disseminate messages to web video audiences.

I think the protest itself is valid, and if you feel the same, you may want to sign this petition before it is submitted to meet the deadline for public comment, which is EOD today. However, like Stu VanAirsdale at The Reeler, I’m a little wary of how all the hoopla surrounding the protest has led to a distortion of what the debate is all about.

Stu wrote a long piece about this earlier in the week on his site. “There is no doubt that these regulations, if adopted as law and followed to the letter, would make independent filmmaking in New York harder and more expensive,” he wrote. But the city is certainly not, as I saw someone broadcast this morning on Twitter, “banning indie films.” The fact that that phrase is even circulating is a sign that what began as a well-intentioned effort to create a discourse about an arbitrary and not entirely logical policy proposal has devolved into rhetoric, and that rhetoric has spun completely out of control.

There’s also a way to look at all of this not as hostile artist-hating censorship, but as a bi-product of the convergence of post-9/11 paranoia over street activity, and good old friendly capitalism. Even then, one stipulation from proposed regulations has been widely overlooked: the Mayor’s Office has the authority to waive the $1 million insurance policy rule in cases “where the applicant is able to demonstrate that such insurance cannot be obtained without imposing an unreasonable hardship on the applicant.” As Stu puts it, “If you have a project serious enough to require a permit, then you need to cover your ass. If you can’t afford to cover your ass, the city has a waiver for you that covers its own. That seems perfectly fair, hardly a free-speech incursion as much as the cost of doing business in New York.”

The sad truth is that most artists can’t afford the cost of doing business in New York anymore. Bothered as I am by the hyperbole, and even though I’ll defend capitalism as an economic system to the end, I support the theoretical notion of a separation between art and commerce for those who choose to work outside of the commercial system. Also, that “no tripod shooting for more than ten minutes” rule just seems stooopid.