I’ve noticed that YouTube channels offering dashcam footage will keep their videos specific to one place: this channel only shows footage from USA and Canada, that channel only shows footage from EU countries. Is this to provide a specific focus, or is there some international copyright legislation at play here?
Maybe it’s just the videos you’re being served. I searched youtube for “dashcam compilation” and here’s one of the first videos I clicked on. Just skimming through it, I see the US, Canada, Czech Republic, Australia, and Germany.
Agree w @Joey_P. One of my guilty pleasures is car crash / fail vids. One of my side entertainments while watching is trying to figure out which country (or state/region of the USA) each clip is from. IME very few vids contain clips from just one country.
I suspect there are some channels / vid producers who lean more heavily on one or another country. Perhaps the OP is seeing that effect.
The sheer commonality, nay ubiquity, of dashcams in Russia and China helps bias the results towards those countries. Plus of course the drunk / craptacular driving habits of folks in those countries.
This is just supposition on my part, but the various channel owners may have found that targeting specific regions leads to higher viewership and ad revenue. I watch North American and Australian dashcams occasionally, and I used to watch a channel that was mainly Russian, but it died abruptly. Switching between different countries can be a bit jarring, and I suspect North American car crashes are just more appealing to North Americans, etc.
Regarding copyright, that’s a bit of a gray area when it comes to dashcams, bodycams, and security cameras and it has never been ruled on in a US court. The argument that such footage is not copyrightable is because it’s not creative/artistic. In other countries the footage may be copyrightable by the security company or service, not the end user. That said, while you may not be granted automatic copyright of your dashcam footage, if you’re the only person who has access to that footage from the start, then you can release it to other parties with copyright-like licensing terms. Basically it becomes a contract law matter rather than a copyright law matter. So you might not have legal pull with a 3rd party infringer, but you would have recourse against any party you did license your footage to who used it in a manner you didn’t agree too. This is all rather gray as well, see copyfraud.
Maybe there’s a sub-genre of dashcam footage of lawyerly guys in suits bearing legal papers charging in front of the car, forcing a claim on who owns the film they’ve generated? In my imagination they buffet the car rhino-style, sort of reverse ambulance-chasing.