Is there such an affirmative duty for the team in the league bylaws? I have not seen such a thing cited and you're treating it as if it exists. Did I miss it? If there is, they indeed would be in a lot of trouble, but I had not understood that to exist.Seems like you’d be using film of the playing field for this purpose, or just pulling the right clips from the all-22 (assuming clubs have license rights to that footage). The scout might refer to something happening on the sideline a couple times, but that’s not where you’d expect his focus to be.
My view of what happened is basically the same as yours. But leaving a camera trained on something that they we allowed to film suggests that either the Pats failed to instruct the crew about the restrictions on filming or the crew deliberately blew off those instructions. The Pats will face sanctions either way; those sanctions will be materially worse if it turns out that they failed to instruct the crew, as that suggests a level of willfulness (i.e., reckless disregard for the rules).
It will be very hard to show the legal standard of reckless disregard here based on what's been reported to date.