Slashdot Mirror
Net Faces 10 -Year Olympic Shutout
Noel Carroll writes: "The BBC reports that 'Websites will be banned from using or showing video clips of Olympic events for the next decade. The restriction, which is being imposed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), is designed to protect the substantial investments made by national broadcasters who do not want their television and radio audiences undermined by internet coverage.'"
What is it about ? The almighty Buck or Freedom Of Speech ? :
Anyway even though I don't follow such events I am quite annoyed by this announce.
but now, look closer to it
how can they ensure it won't be broadcasted on the Internet ?
No way.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
All I can say to this is "Thank Bob for the CBC!":)
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
The broadcasters will have finally caught up with others. Then they'd say, "let the game be on the net too, but our web sites still have the exclusive rights!"
Let's hope by then the existing net broadcasters would have even better technology, or have already established firm brand names.
Oh no! If this trend keeps up, before long the Internet with be nothing but a bunch of boring scientific research projects, software development groups and device driver downloads!! Oh, NOooo!!!
People will continute to shop in real stores, spammers will give up and folks will have to go to pubs to socialize. What'll we do, what'll we DO?!?!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I agree - in fact, I would be willing to bet $100 bucks that if they actually make this decision, they will change their minds and reverse it within 5 years. In less than 3 years it will be obvious to everyone that it was the wrong thing to do.
Why? Two related reasons. First: Soon, TV will commonly delivered over IP. The lines between TV and the Internet are going to start blurring. Next generation set top boxes that pull MPEG-2 video straight off IP multicast over DSL and cablemodems are already out there, making money.
That will enable stage 2: a world where there will be services like Napster for TV - imagine being able to access a gigantic on line library of TV content - watch any episode of X-Files or the Simpsons, whenever you want!
And it will be legal, but probably not free. For example, I quit watching TV two years ago. I can't stand the ads, and having watch my favorite shows only when the network decides they should be scheduled. Everyone who is used to the web will want TV to be the same - A flat fee for access, and then watch what you want, when you want. (TIVO is a step in the right direction).
The IOC thinks they will get more money by locking out competition to the current broadcasters. How foolish!
Soon, the broadcasters with the money will be the ones that provide people with exactly what they want. The world the IOC and the big networks know is going bye-bye.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
At some level this is nothing new. All professional sporting events in the US are all prefaced by a little statement that any recording or broadcasting of the event without the express written consent of whatever association runs the sport (NFL, NHL, NBA, etc.) is a crime.
I believe that the right of Fair Use still overrides these messages. If I want to post the latest score or write a review of my experiences at the last baseball game, they don't have a leg to stand on legally. Even if I post screenshots from the broadcast or possibly even short movie excerpts - the copyright laws allow limit reproduction. What they do have in their favour is a large selection of lawyers to send cease-and-desist demands around - does anyone here actually run an opensource sports news site? Have they had any grief?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Yes, the Aussies did a spectacular job. The people were enthusiastic about all the athletes instead of just their own, the logo and celebrations were tasteful yet modern (blasted difficult to pull off nowadays), and the events were fun to watch (unless you were stuck with NBC).
The organizers, or the IOC, whoever handled marketing and licensing, whored out the Olympic name to anyone who could pony up the cash. Come on, tossing away spectators' own food and drinks after they paid wads of $Aus to see the events just because it didn't have the right label? What a pile of crap. I bet the ancient Greeks are wishing they could come back from Elysium to shove spears through the entire IOC. Quite frankly, I'd like to help them.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Hehehe... he said,
help fund athletes from poorer countries
Okay, obviously you've been listening to the Olympic folks. They make a big to-do about some of the projects where they throw their nickels and dimes. The large picture is quite different. The IOC has been continuously thinning out the ranks of the athletes; such aid as they give to athletes from poorer countries is simply for PR purposes, to keep those countries from going wholly unrepresented.
While they've been adding sports, the IOC has cut back events, weight classes, and numbers of participants across the boards, in order to minimize the number of participants in any given sport. When you think about it, it makes sense: the media is only going to cover a little bit of any given sport, and having depth beyond that is expensive and wasteful from a commercial standpoint. One of the other strategies they've used is to require countries to qualify athletes. The problem is, left unchecked these measures would pretty well guarantee that some countries would have no athletes in the games.
So they make allowances for underrepresented countries, and they run some provisional programs to try to bring the athletes from these countries to the point where they don't look like fools in the Games.
Naturally, these programs are nice, too, when they're talking to IBM or UPS and trying to get funding. So they make sure that their media partners, during the Olympic year when the IOC and USOC gets 90% of their sponsorship, paint a picture in which the wealth generated by the Olympics is used primarily for charitable causes. Bunk. They've got better uses for their money. And FYI, there were more athletes from poor countries participating in 1976, when each country had a *right* to send a representative in each sport.
If you force the television networks to compete with the internet
Now that's an interesting turn of phrase. If you have free speech, you're forcing people to compete. Geez, sounds downright nasty. Perhaps you're right; maybe we should protect the television networks from this brutal use of force by strongly encouraging everyone else to keep their traps shut.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
That the IOC picks a place that won't go over well from a local marketing/gladhandling perspective or that they expect they local gov't to suspend laws just to appease them? I agree that SLC should not change any laws for the event but you have to wonder what the IOC was thinking when they try to put a corporate love-fest in a place where The Official Beer of the Olympics can't be easily purchased, ne'st pa?
...the lack of respect that online media really gets. Maybe respect is a bad choice of words but it's Monday so I'll explain:
While it is true that online publications are the minority, their contribution to the journalism "scene" seems to be minimized by traditional journalists who are afraid because anyone with just a AOL account (and 2 free megs of hosted space) can get as much attention as the NY Times. Decentralization of content publication is as worrysome to traditional print media as Napster is to the record labels. Anyone else see the parallels between RIAA v Napster and Mattel v That Guy Who Criticized Them On His Web Page? Anyway, The IOC doesn't see any online rags (not counting ABC, CNN, MSNBC and other traditional news franchises) as reputable, established news sources. I just hope in 10 years this conclusion comes back to bite them in the ass... we can all guess at how everything will change by then.
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
From the Olympic Charter:
The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to
building a peaceful and better world by educating youth
through sport practised without discrimination of any
kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual
understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity
and fair play.
Apparently, discrimination doesn't include websites...
>SLC is only 50% mormon.
The other 50% live in Mesa AZ.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I'm not sure I understand.
If someone sends me an email, and I feel that I need to share it with the world, then YES, I feel morally justified in doing so. Just as I can publish a letter you wrote me, or repeat a conversation you sent me, or (in my country anyway) record a conversation we had in person, even if you don't know about it. Unless terms discussing the fact that this was to be kept private were discussed, you have *NOTHING* to bitch about.
Lausanne, Switzerland-- In a move sure to attract attention from both national and international regulators, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) announced plans to merge its governing board with that of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
The announced merger set off a field of protests from other organizations seeking to offend the largest user base possible, including the MPAA and Microsoft. The RIAA announced plans to either block the merger or join it.
"This merger would create a virtual Internet monopoly in the rapidly growing field of organizations seeking to disgust their own audience" said Jane Regalia of Microsoft Corporation (MSFT). "This is an area we feel very passionate about-- Microsoft will defend to its utmost the ability to inconvenience and annoy its customers."
"Oh yeah-- innovate, innovate, innovate," she added.
Prominant members of both ICANN and IOC were unimpressed with protests against the Internet mega-merger.
"Look, we're not in the business of looking out for users of the Internet," said Jason Henkleson, Chairman of the ICANN At-large Members Dispowerment subcommittee. "I mean, if we were looking out for everyday Internet citizens, we'd be pretty inept, right?"
IOC Chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch, speaking from his palatial half-mile yacht modeled after the more modest Queen Elizabeth II, said, "whatever."
"By the way, you can't print that on the Internet," he added.
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
So basically, the Olypics are like the RIAA that didn't cry wolf?
Well, tough snuff. That's like saying we must ban automobiles, since that will put horse and carriage makers out of business. Or that lightbulbs will ruin the candle industry.
My heart feels for you.. It really does.
Ok. So lets be sympathetic for a minute. We currently have a system that *cough* *cough* works. We have mega product producer who pays top dollar for add space. We then have even more-mega-media-maker that buys air-time (and cyphins off coverage to many of the individual ads). A lot of this money gets funnelled into the Olympics, which eventually trickles money down to the non-economic powerhouse countries..... Soooo How did the Greeks do it without TV? Damn, that's a tough one.
-Michael
-Michael
What I'd like to see when the games come back around is a beowulf cluster of tv tuners plugged on every possible olypic stream in the world, retransmitting it all over the net. We (in the broad sense) need to gather and build something huge, something that blows the 'official' media outlets out of the water, providing live video and commentary, as well as up-to-the-minute stats and rankings, to show the IOC what a foolish decision they've made. I personally don't give a fnarg's ass about the olympics. Hypercommercial clownery that encourages brainwashed high-performance meatheads isn't exactly my interpretation of entertainment, especially when their feats and prowesses have nothing to do with normal human activity and survival. Pole vaulting isn't exactly something you'd do outside the scope of olympic competition. My 2 canadian cents.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
What do you mean? I know I'm being the devil's advocate here, but look...
You can't take pictures at the movie theater, or at lots of concerts, or some museums.. the list goes on. IS that the company in charge exercising 'too much control'? No. It's not.
The olympics is different how? It's not a public exhibition.. they aren't 'outlawing' olympic pictures.. they are simply not giving license for web broadcasters to get the media they need.
ANd the only reason they can do this is because it's what other broadcasters want. Traditinal media *wants* the olympic viewers.
And belive me, when they lose enough viewers over the next few years to the net, things will change.
Sure, they have an interest in protecting the broadcasters, but to decide to close for the next 10 years a content delivery system that has been open for less than ten years is an incredibly short-sighted move. To put it plainly, they have no clue what the net will look like in 3, 5, 8 years. Not even this crowd has perfect foresight. Of course, now that they've pledged that, it will probably go into upcoming contracts, and then they'll be bound by it. I think they'll really regret this move.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
At some level this is nothing new. All professional sporting events in the US are all prefaced by a little statement that any recording or broadcasting of the event without the express written consent of whatever association runs the sport (NFL, NHL, NBA, etc.) is a crime.
However, at what level does this become news and thus open to the public? Surely it seems inappropriate to forbid posting scores or even showing still images of the athletes. Then at what level does this blur into showing a series of still images?
Is it possible for criminals to own the legal rights to the recordings of them committing criminal acts? (I reserve judgement on whether a home video of a bunch of MPAA lawyers at work counts as a crime).
Somehow it is legal to Wal-Mart to film me while I am in the parking lot, and presumably do whatever they want with the film, and yet I can't bring my camcorder into the Olympic games for which I paid a fortue for a ticket and then put it on my website. It is not really that surprising, but at the same time it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Anyway, just another example of the collision of ancient systems of exchange entertaiment as information intersecting with the modern world.
"Politics is for the moment, an equation lasts eternity" -A. Einstein
If there is justice in the world, the IOC will be held to this in five or six years. The current broadcasting industry world will look so very different, if it's even around anymore at all. Then the IOC can be mired in their own stupidity and die a slow media death without the support of the Internet.
Unfortunately they'll probably just rescind this directive when they realize where all the ad money has gone in a few years, and embrace the Internet media outlets in true CorporateWhore(tm) style. And it's a real shame.
--
Rob Carlson
>There is a story...I *really* wish i could think >of the name of it.... takes place in the >future,in this communist society like place
If you're thinking of
Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
It's a religious, not a communist society.
That might not be the story you're thinking of,
but it certainly fits.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Granted, there has alwasy been opposition to technological shifts. My dad use to say that you'd have to have a man running some one mile in front of your car to warn people.
But my point was more one of not sitting idle and letting organizations sensor us like this just because they have what sounds like a rational argument. "But poor people could die if we don't give them life-long welfare" almost sounds compelling.. Till you realize the free-rider problem will ultimately make a society full of dependants leaching off the now minority working class.
Rethinking a bit, it makes sence that at critical passes such as this, it is important to have smooth transition. In the dawn of the automotive age, we had to make allowances for horses. In the dawn of the networked age, we can't simply allow all old-style forms of civilization to go belly up while waiting for the migration.. I guess I do applaud that there was only 10 years applied to the Olympic Moratorium. It could have been an unlimited mandate I guess.
-Michael
-Michael
In other words, they took away our rights to watch what we wanted when. They payed a bazillion dollars to have exclusive coverage, so that they were our only [american] choice. They took away the rights of other broadcast stations that could have made different choices, and choose to air at other times, other formats, other events. (There was more than just swimming this year, right?)
It makes me boil to listen to NBC whine about ratings, money lost, etc, when it was THEM that spent a ton of money. And did a bad job at it. Actually I take that part back...they can do a bad job at it if they want, but let someone else have a chance to make it good!
Rader
Personally, I was a college/amateur baseball player (though my current job doesn't leave time for that anymore - just softball). I always enjoyed watching the baseball games there - even as a Yankees fan (what a payroll!), I do like the purity of baseball that has been less touched by money (heck, even the Little League WS is getting pretty commercial now). I enjoy seeing athletes compete in a variety of other sports, especially those (such as gymnastics) where the participants do some incredible things (I'm all for a minimum age for that, so we don't have so many anorexic 13 yr olds ruining themsleves, but that's another story). I'm from the USA, and I usually cheer for the US athletes, but I'd rather see good competition than a full US blowout.
Battlebots would be a neat addition (better than synchonized swimming), but hey, you can't have everything.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I agree, it's all about control. The only reason the IOC is doing this is that they don't yet have the means to control Internet broadcasting.
I promise you, even as we speak, IOC has a team of people working on securing Internet broadcasting rights to whoever pays the most money. Probably before the next Olympics, but definitely before this 10 year ban is up, the IOC will have some announcement about their new, great, exclusive deal with Company X to broadcast all events on the Internet. And all Company X had to do was pony up the money to get it.
The real question in my mind is, will anyone even care about the Olympics in 10 years? I know I won't: I didn't watch a single even this past summer, and don't plan on doing so ever again.
Is that the IOC will *not* grant a license to record (as they do with television) for a net broadcaster, for ANY amount of money. Tha'ts hwat they are saying.
They'er saying that if some net broadcaster offers them fees like the television companies do, they will NOT hand them out anyway.
If you freely hand out your name, you can't bitch about what they do with it. Especially if it's true. You had no reasonable expectation of privacy.
The person has a right to discuss with anyone and everyone who and what was said.
Well, I hate to say it, but the Olympics were doing just fine before billions of dollars were invested. I mean, honestly, other than a nice flat place, what do you need to run a race?
Sure, without a directive like this the Olympics would lose a lot of fundings, but big deal! A lot of people have lost sight of what the Olympics are supposed to be. Not a spectator event, but a way to bring nations together without war.
Where else can you get two countries that absolutely hate each other to fight without bloodshed?
The Olympics provide a much-needed form of release; instead of the people getting all riled up for war and building tanks, they get all riled up for sport and build stadiums.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
First of all, splitting up events and spreading them out is ridiculous. Delaying them 1/2 a day for prime time is ridiculous. Pushing gymnastics till almost midnight, while saying it's prime time is outright mean. Come on, 12 year old girls are suppose to stay up every night till midnight, just to watch their "prime time" event? What a bunch of crap. You can't postpone events half a day (when you can get on the internet and find out who wins live) in the name of prime time, and then spread the crap to midnight.
What a joke. I hope they take a beating so bad in ratings that it'll go back to the good ol' days. I ****LOVED**** waking up in the middle of the night, or middle of the day, turn the channel to some odd ESPN or even odder channel (many choices), and watch CURLING, or spit ball shooting, or ANYTHING. The event was live (or almost live), fascinating, and much more educational than some stupid heart-to-heart interest story about how someone amputated both legs, and still came back for the 1 mile run. Then you watch the race, and they lose anyway.
I'd rather watch some person in the stands holding a camcorder, talking in Italian, with a budget of only 5 pesos, than watch NBC spend millions of dollars on making McCrap again.
Rader
However, 10 years is too long. Noone can tell what the media world will look like by then. Traditional TV may already have been replaced by webcasts by then, who knows. If I were them I'd prohibit Olympics video for the next Olympics, and look again after that.
Note they're only prohibiting video, not other news - they can't do that, of course.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Didn't miss 'em either.
Guess I won't watch the next 5 either.
Put the Olympics against 'Who wants to be a millionaire', and see who wins....
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
So SLC is now under fire to change their liquor laws for the 2002 games because the LDS's make it mandatory that if you want to drink w/o eating you have to belong to one of those bogus clubs. But bribe taking is ok I guess.
The Olympics has become a sick distorted representation of what it once was. The money in it, from coporate sponsors has corrupted it's perspective to the point where it's more about promoting sponsors than atheletism (and atheletes).
I thought maybe the web would fix this to a degree by bypassing much of the sponsorship. Instead, the IOC has made a move which will surely push the Olympics in the direction of irrelevance. Sooner or later the corporate sponsors will see the ratings plunge and react accordingly. More importantly though, this is a powerful demonstration to anyone who might be interested in the Olympics just how central sponsors are to the Olympics.
sigs are a waste of space
$ man reality
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
IMHO the IOC should just open up the olympics and license web coverage to as many content providers as are willing to pay.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The best place to hide, is out in the open, because none would expect to find you there. If you go into a good hiding place, people will search harder and harder until they find you.
Similarly, when trying to keep people away from doing something, banning them will only make them work harder. Finding someway to let them get what they want easily, though still in some way keeping to your principles, would work better.
Take for example the movie and music industries. Keeping VHS, recordable CDs, or tapes away from people would never work, so they allow it but use copy protection of some sort. Had they just banned them, they would be used anyway.
The IOC needs to let people have some things, just offer more to their paying TV advertisers instead of cripling and not adding.
Have you read my journal today?
Personally I think the heart and soul of the Olympics is track and field, but I'm not sure if I've ever watched it. You'd think that they skip straight to the finals of the sprints, and that nobody has to make it through the heats to get there.
And if you think this ban on the internet is bad, how about this last olympics ban on moving pictures?! The sports highlights would show a picture of the action while a commentator read what happened. They claimed that video could be used after the broadcast, but after watching their broadcast of a US soccer match I wanted to watch the highlights on the same channel and all I got were still pictures!
Another little issue is that they would not allow athletes to post their diaries online. For those of you that have not followed an obscure sport (I follow cycling in the US), this is the absolute best coverage of an event that you can get. Reading in the athletes own words what they were thinking at that crucial moment is far more informative than listening to some bozo that's covering 150 different sports because his hair looks good.
The olympics are dead to me.
PS. How the hell do they get to trademark a name like Olympics, Olympic, Olympiad...etc?!
t
I didn't watch the Olympics this year, though I tried real hard... It sucks when all you get is small clips of the home crowd (USA) and the medal winners for 4 minutes at a time, delayed by however many hours. I used to like watching the competition (usually with the sound down, so I didn't have to listen to the inane announcers), but they made it pretty difficult this year.
Guess I'll stick to watching "World's Strongest Man" and "Battlebots"...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Proposal: :)
Let's all send urine samples on the IOC address... they should know what to do with it. Just to let them know that those watching Olympic games on the net are not as much on crack as they are
--
Baron de Coubertin (sp?) is spinning in his grave.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The current IOC board needs to go, and people with a billion times more integrity needs to be put in place.
Well, if you're looking for people with more integrity than the IOC, I know just the guy to spearhead the new committee. And if by some stretch he has a job come January, well, he knows someone who might need a job instead...
Jay (=
Oh no! No Pot-Curling. What a shame! The best events will be covered on the internet anyway: IOC bribery and scandle, and 14-yrold drug violations.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Yes: Go to 2.
No: THINK then go back to 1.
2. Did you or they get caught?
Yes: We do not know you and what you have brought to the Olympic movement is disgrace! Get lost!
No: Excellent! Go to 3.
3. Will events which use sporting equipment sold by Official Olympic sponsors be featured prominently?
Yes: Excellent! Go to 4.
No: No? No!? What are you some kind of alturistic charity nut? Get out of here!
4. Do you solemnly promise never to call into question who the IOC are and why the public really has no control over this scam?
Yes: Great! See you in Athens!
No: Fold this form in half 5 times, add salt, chew and swallow.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Based on the ratings that NBC is getting, they may wind up losing money on this deal. You can be sure what when the next contract gets written, it will probably be less in today's dollars.
Anyway, this winds up being less than a billion per game (there's 4 games between now and then). So say NBC gives up their exclusivity but pays only $250-$500 mln per game, but gets TV exclusive. Then have 100+ web sites, each for a particular event. Low speed feeds (28.8k?) are free, but ad-supported. Higher-speed feeds (DSL/Cable/etc) are low cost. Maybe some sharing agreement between the web sites so you can get multiple feeds for one price or something.
Would that make up the missing $500mln? You're now looking at each site paying $5 million. 100,000 people paying $50 would do it. Or 1 million people paying $5. Or 2 million people paying $2.50. Make it still $5 to cover equipment cost and other. Would you pay $5.00 to watch all the bobsled events? In their entirety? No crappy special-interest stories, just bobsleding? How about paying $100 to get access to 50 events?
Actually the last Olympics was so completely corporatized that it was totally antithema to the idealism that was at one time what was considered the "Olympic Spirit".
From the "You can't get in wearing a non-sponsor T-shirt" corporate cops, er security gaurds at the gate, to the "you can't eat that sandwich because it violates McDonalds right to sell you an EggMcMuffin" garbage where they would actually take food from people and throw it away, to this pathetic "ten year ban", the entire concept of the Olympics is completely and totally based on corporate greed. I look for the next Olympics to be so corporate-controlled that there will be no one allowed in unless they are wearing "OFFICIAL" Olympic clothes, and if you aren't you will be forced to purchase them at the gate. And if you wish to watch the Olympics on TV, you will have to purchase the "Olympic" version of some cable converter. Frankly, I hope they do that. It will show them that people aren't "that" interested in the Olympics. It was cool a few years back. But most of us are not going to be willing to go the route of "pay-per-view" Olympics on TV. It just wouldn't be worth it.
How many people that watched the Olympics just because the shows they normally watch weren't on? I know quite a few that just watched nothing rather than watch the Olympics. It just wasn't "fun" this time around. Corporatized sports are about as much "fun" as the WWF and WCW wrestling are "intelligent". It just isn't made to be that way.
------------
Yeah, I miss the good old days of,
"The scores are 9.6, 9.5, 9.6, and a 4.3 from the Russian judge."
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
They've just managed to alienate a certain segment of the population. That segment... including me... didn't bother to watch the Olympics on TV this time around, and probably won't in the future either.
Note 1: In a long series of decisions dating back all the way to 1817, the US Supreme Court has held that "fair use" is a Constitutional free speech/free press right.
Note 2: "Conspiracy" consists in an agreement among parties to violate the law, together with at least one overt act [within the jurisdiction of the law] (but which act need not itself be illegal) in accordance with that agreement. Conspiracy -- even to commit a misdemeanor -- is a felony, as the KKK found out in the '60s.
Note 3: Acting within the US to deprive US citizens of their Constitutional rights is not a legal act.
IANAL, but that's how I see it: if the IOC tries this against US web-sites, they should be prosecuted.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I'm sure there's still a few dot-coms out there with venture capital to burn, even in today's economy, who would pay good money for the priviledge of broadcasting the Olympics via the web. It would cut down complaints about the way NBC broadcasts the games (or whoever it is in two years), and it would give even more money to the ridiculously corrupt and wealthy Olympic organizers. It seems like a win for everyone, except of course for the dot-com who wasted millions on exclusive rights to crappy jerky video of the Olympic Games.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
A lot of people have lost sight of what the Olympics are supposed to be. ... a way to bring nations together without war.
That role has been taken over by MacDonalds.
It now reads:
The goal of the Olympic Movement is to make money, buttloads of money. So much money that we won't actually need to put the squeeze on cities who want to host the Olympics, though it won't stop us from doing it anyway. We want to roll around in 50's and 100's and put rolled up 20's in our ears and nose!
We want to educate youth that there is nothing better than money. As a matter of fact, we just like to say that word. Money. Money. Moneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoney. We will not discriminate as long as you pay up and play by our totalitarian rules, and if you are an athlete you have no rights whatsoever. If we say smile for the camera, you better smile Buck'o!
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
This isn't really anything new. The IOC has made many outlandish decisions in the past and will continue to in future.
The ones I feel sorry for are the athletes that spend years training and competing just to get their 10 minutes of fame. After the Olympics are over they sponsor some TV adds and quickly fall out of the spotlight due to lack of coverage. Will CNN continue to pass the torch or will they bury it if it doesn't get ratings? If it doesn't rate it doesn't skate!
This all comes back to the IP issues. Who owns your thoughts, your best times, your face in the spotlight. The IOC is basically saying they own the athletes and you're not going to see them unless we get money.
> $3,500,000,000...
but all the poor countries won't be able to and the games will become that much more adulterated without funding.
A more interesting figure would be the breakdown on how much of that wad of bills went into the pockets of corrupt IOC officials, corrupt officials in the poor companies supposedly being supported, etc.
You have been following the news about how the IOC operates, I suppose?
Now, if I discover that the IOC is using the money to feed the starving and educate the ignorant, I'd be as apologetic as I would be surprised. But from what has come to light over the past few years about who they are and how they operate, the risk of surprise would seem to be very slight.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Not just the Internet, but the Olympics was also a wasted oportunity for Digital TV. Digital TV, satellite or cable, claims that one of its advantages is that it offers many channels. So why did the broadcasters not take advantage of this and allocate a channel to continuously cover a particular event - both heats and finals. That way viewers who want to follow a particular (maybe minority interest) event can watch all of it and viewers could choose which events to follow rather than only being shown (on a small number of channels) what the editors wish the vieweres to see.
> I haven't heard that much except for how the head of the organisation is a bit of a crackpot. Could you post some links please?
Start here.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If I were determined to netcast it anyway there would be very little they could do to stop me.
For example, I could obtain servers in nations that don't care what the olympic committee says or have lax copyright laws, then upload the information direct from TV broadcasts off satellite or from broadcast TV, using VPN to mask content of the stream, with other content obfuscation techniques.
There are literally dozens of ways to circumvent and content restriction. Also, facts are not copyrightable in the USA, reporting of them is no violation of any law in the USA, so internet reporting of events (not actually streaming audio/video) can not be effectively stopped.
This is just more evidence that the Olympics has nothing to do with amature competition and everything to do with selling tickets to a human circus. The broadcasters being the primary ticket buyers that P.T. Barnum spoke of in his "suckers" comment.
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Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
From earlier this century...
Lawmakers today passed a law prohibiting the use of automobiles, those recently invented "horseless carriages" which allow convenient travel overland, within city limits. While recognizing their unparalleled utility for travel between communities, lawmakers passed this law in order to protect the investments of buggy whip manufacturers. "Buggy whip manufacturers are an important sector of our economy," one congressman was quoted as saying. "It is essential and fair that we protect the investment and business of those corporations by limiting this technology which stands to undermine their very business, and, hence, our very way of life."
-Rob
I think the olympic commitee is just a bunch of whores and they enflame me to no end.
Um, y'know, they have a cream or a shot or something for that now...
Jay (=
The simple fact is that the only way the Olympics gets funded is by these sponsors and by television money paid because the advertising is so lucrative. If you force the television networks to compete with the internet, you are going to create a competitive market that results in less money to support the games. The games are already dominated by the rich and fat countries - allowing Internet broadcasts would make it even worse as the IOC could not afford to help fund athletes from poorer countries.
Nonperiodic Central Trajectory
In 10 years, the Olympics may find that trying to squeeze out the last dollar has put them behind re-runs of Silver Spoons in terms of viewership and popularity.
As we all know, the Internet is the ideal media upon which to broadcast or publish Olympic data. So it is only fitting that they would choose to ignore the Internet as a valid media outlet.
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IANAL, but if I read the BBC's coverage correctly, that is exactly what the IOC is attempting to do. They are "engaging in an agreement to violate [US] law, together with at least one overt act toward that end" -- the definition of conspiracy. And conspiracy is a felony. So if they continue with such action against any US website, the individuals involved should be prosecuted and (when found guilty) jailed, and the corporation either fined or broken up, and in any case not allowed to engage in any business in the US.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
The net is perfect for an event like the olympics.
I could just see broadcast company:
"Gee lets see, there's multiple events going on at the same time and there's 1 station broadcasting it. How can we fix this?...
I don't know, but let's definitely not use the internet. People might figure out that there is more than the USA in the olympics. Internet Bad, USA good."
bastards
is that I was really looking forward to seeing a .mov of that poor gymnast who just completely missed the horse on her vault and just kept flipping and flipping.... now i've gotta wait ten years for someone to legally make it available.
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I take no responsibility for any spelling mistakes in the above post.
The FBC reports that "Free operating systems will be banned from being used or shown on personal computers for the next decade. The restriction, which is being imposed by Microsoft (MS), is designed to protect the substantial investments made by national software companies who do not want their software markets undermined by free software.