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Olympic Committee Prohibits Streaming Apps, Vines and GIFs From Its Events (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Olympics Committee has introduced a new set of social media guidelines for the 2016 games. Not only will streaming applications and vines be prohibited, but GIFs will be too. TechCrunch reports: "Part of the new restriction appears in the official broadcast rules (PDF), under 'Internet and Mobile Platforms': '[...] the use of Olympic Material transformed into graphic animated formats such as animated GIFs (i.e. GIFV), GFY, WebM, or short video formats such as Vines and others, is expressly prohibited.' Then, in the FAQ for the social and digital media guidelines (PDF): 'Broadcasting images via life-streaming applications (e.g. Periscope, Meerkat) is prohibited inside Olympic venues.' The versions of these documents updated for the 2014 games in Sochi don't have any comparable language, or at least nothing this specific. A possible exception is the 'Photographer's Undertaking,' which states: 'The dissemination of moving images or sound captured in an Olympic venue, through any media, including display on the internet, Mobile Platform and other interactive media or electronic medium, is strictly prohibited.'"
Dont mess with the IOC's money.
Prohibit television broadcasts, too.
These are the same people that value profit above lives. Good job, morons!
It's a big corrupt waste of time and resources, it funnels huge amounts of money out of the lower and middle class into the pockets of the wealthy and at the expense of nations..
fuck the Olympics so fucking much
you've just described 90% of the governments on the planet.
I guess they're just for old people now.
On any media at all.
But the IOC's over-the-top "We own it all!" is just a bit much. They're almost to the point of enforcing death penalty should someone even think about posting a selfie of themselves at the Olympics.
If this is reproduction of the entertainment, and if it's strictly limited to the individuals attending the events as spectators (printed on said ticket), is this no different than forbidding recording in a movie theater?
However, I imagine there is a 'freedom of the press' interest in certain things, such as things going wrong. Like, what if someone were to take a picture of a swimmer spitting out the polluted water after said event?
Mod me down, I dare you!
With no police for enforcement these words are spineless, but hey they make great controversy. Don't feed the trolls, move along nothing to see (or hear) here.
are running the show.
Wasn't the Olympics supposed to be about the worldwide celebration of amateur sport?
That is, sport done for the love of it, not for money.
This is what anonymization services were invented for, people!
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
On any media at all.
But the IOC's over-the-top "We own it all!" is just a bit much. They're almost to the point of enforcing death penalty should someone even think about posting a selfie of themselves at the Olympics.
Dear mpercy,
In a recent slashdot post, you used the word "Olympics" without the express written permission of the International Olympic Committee. This constitutes copyright infringement and unauthorized use of our intellectual property. To avoid a lawsuit, send us $980 within the next 24 hours, or face the wrath of our lawyers. Do not delay; we know where your little girl goes to school.
Yours Truly,
The International Olympic Committee
An international, non-profit, non-governmental organization
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Without the athletes, the IOCCC - no wait, that's the international obfuscated C code contest - uhm... the IOC is it? has nothing.
It seems long past time for athletes to get together and say "No, fuck that. Either you let us record our own events, or we're not participating. Our sideways smartphone video and looped animated GIFs are not going to compete with NBC's twenty million dollar television cameras. Just ease the fuck up already and stop power tripping all over that shit."
The athletes have all the power here, not the IOC. It seems to be getting past time for a demonstration of that fact.
Does anyone even watch the Olympics anymore? For me, it just seems like a good way to block regularly scheduled programming. We get it, you sport.
If they had a channel dedicated to olympics that you had to opt-in to... few would bother.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Do we really care anymore? Every year it turns into a bunch of political bull, cheating speculation and doping allegations. Without social media to spread the manure around, what else is left? Skimpy volleyball uniforms? It hasn't been about athletics for a long time...
It is just to be sure us in the U.S. don't accidentally see a competition we aren't expected to win. Hell, rare we get to see a competition at all, this is just a reality show now isn't it? Sob stories, hardship stories, family stories, Some sport competition, story about making the stories, story about the people making the stories, repeat.
Won't be surprised when the certified mail or "you've been served" paperwork arrives.
You're joking, but this is basically what happened to "Olympics of the Mind" back in the 1980s
"The dissemination of [..] sound captured in an Olympic venue, through any media, [..] is strictly prohibited."
So no phone calls?
I'm boycotting the Olympics. Doped up propagandists.
We used to record the broadcasts, first on VCR of course, and later Tivo. But since the cable companies have obsoleted both of those, plus our PC tuners, with encrypted digital transmission, we simply won't watch at all. We are in a valley that does not receive any over-the-air signals so we don't have a choice - we must pay to watch television, even broadcast. We refuse to pay even more than we already are just to do what we've done since the late 70s - record television for later viewing and/or skipping of segments/advertisements we are not interested in watching. The amount of absolute crap that is mixed in with every few minutes of actual events and competitions is just too great. If we can't skip over the shit and watch the important stuff, fuck it.
Because of this, our television watching has significantly decreased, as has our programming package (and also our monthly bill). When the recording options went to shit, we started watching "on demand" instead, and if it wasn't on that, we just didn't watch it. But now the cable company is further trying to extort even more money out of us by reducing "on demand" offerings to "HD only", which just pisses us off even more (we do not have a fancy new set). And to add even more headache, what on demand programming that had closed captions, no longer does. Cable company doesn't care because "on demand" is not required to carry captions like the live broadcasts. We of course are told we can (pay to) subscribe to their DVR service and record programming which would then have the captions preserved during playback. Fuck.
They don't want any videos of people with Zika getting out.
They're the one remembering the events and replaying them in their heads.
Someone in the IOC needs to be picked up an shooken - hard.
I guess this means that proud parents can't tweet pictures of their medal winning children.
Attendees can't talk about what a great experience they're having.
Everybody else ignoring what's going on there.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The olympics suck a bagful of dicks anyhow.
Strictly for low lifes and shitballs.
The 1970s is calling for you to come back.
If they're trying to prevent people from getting excited about the Olympics or share their enthusiasm, they've succeeded. At this point I really couldn't give a crap about the Olympic games. Now I just feel sorry for the athletes who are risking disease over something the IOC seems dead set on restricting access to.
They also sued a Greek restaurant.
This is very sad for me to say for those who have future Olympic dreams, but between the nightmare that is Rio infrastructure/security and this latest move to try and control all media, I sincerely hope that all future Olympic venues withdraw, and every other city on the planet tells the IOC to go fuck themselves.
Perhaps that will be a gentle enough reminder as to why they should not act so damn arrogant.
As long as we're making unenforceable demands, I require that the IOC come suck my cack.
So I'm assuming APNGs, MNGs, and WEBMs are OK?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Multinational meg-corps love to insist that they own everything and people must pay them, but that just aint so.
WARNING: They DO own their copyrighted material, like logos, trademarks, commentary they create, artistic visual elements, etc. so people need to be careful about that stuff, but they DO NOT own the facts of the historical events.
In the US, Pro football and pro baseball leagues are always insisting that nobody can report on the games without permission (i.e. $$$$) and they count on everybody being scared and backing down. They do not actually own the historical facts of the games.
They need to do this, because all those selfies that athletes took during the parade destroyed the Beijing Olympics. Oh wait... they didn't.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's not a coke product, so the athletic village can't have it.
Sounds like the folks setting this thing up are on coke.
The athletes should strike, but they are held hostage because they only have a few years to compete.
They have definitely moved far from the intent of the Olympics to something about taking all you can.
Ignore is my plan.
I wonder what happens when they try to sue a mountain range
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
All this crap about controlling who, what and how people can enjoy the Olympic experience is the reason I'm bored with it and will not be watching a single event.
Seriously, I'm having trouble deciding whether this is old-fashioned out-of-control money-grubbing, or it's the IOC trying to keep a lid what is shaping up to be a gigantic figurative (and, in the case of the swimming events, literal) shit-show.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I thought they quit that years ago.
If they returned it to the original Greek format (naked), I might be interested. Otherwise... yawn.
Greece would have to rename it.
Which is pretty much what I'd do if I was Greece, to distance themselves from this travesty.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's a reason they're doing this. It's not just that the IOC is incredibly greedy. It's that their greed is fueled by NBC's money, and NBC is damn well going to get their pound of flesh for the $1.29 billion they paid for exclusive rights. If recent news reports are accurate, NBC is just barely breaking even, having sold $1.2 billion in advertising so far.
So sure, blame IOC's greed. But don't forget to blame NBC's greed too. They want every second of Olympic imagery to be surrounded by inescapable commercials, or they could be in serious trouble. If the interest of advertisers falls off even a tiny bit, they start losing money on the Games, and they have a contract out through 2032.
Now that would be a story!
That started to happen with the Olympic Restaurant in Denver in 1976, but Colorado told the Olympics to piss off for different reasons, and the lawsuit fizzled out.
Maybe if I saw random clips and pictures from the Olympics I might think about watching through some approved channel. As it stands, I likely will forget they are on and not watch at all.
I bet they don't want people to show the world how filthy the place is and how sick it makes them. Only pre-approved footage that reduces the appearance that the IOC would rather take a fat bribe than choose a nice place to hold the games.
But I'll say it again, if absolutely everybody just boycotted the games, and I never had to hear about them for the duration (and they ceased the tradition), I would be very happy.
CAPTCHA: latrine
First the GOP, now the IOC
What if the GIFs are produced automatically? My photo automatically uploads all photos to Google Photos. If Google notices that a group of photos comprise a sequence of events, it will helpfully produce an animated version of all of those images together. Is Google violating the IOC's rules if I were to photograph an event and happened to capture enough for Google to put together an animated GIF?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Greece needs cash, though. They should offer to sell the naming rights to the mountain range to the IOC...
You used the work "Olympic" without our express written permission. This is punishable by swimming in Rio.
Ahh! "word" not "work". *sigh*
So far, none of my social media feeds have even mentioned that anything is going on in that part of the world where people would rather stab you than give you directions. I consider that an overall plus.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Yeah, the IOC aren't "fascist capitalists", whatever that means. They are an international NGO and have far more in common with far-left movements like BLM and SJW than they do any dirty capitalism. You remember how we all found out that the Democratic Party was not what it seemed? Turns out, it's a bunch of racist assholes who bused violent staffers into opposition rallies to fuck their shit up? Yeah, the IOC is the same way. Supposedly on our side, trusted with running the Olympics, and it turns out they're a bunch of corrupt NGO assholes who only care about themselves.
Fascist? Even today's Neo-Nazis aren't fascists. You need to stop using that word.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
They've figured out that people attending these events aren't going to take anybody's broadcast revenues by sharing on social media. It's about sharing the experience with their friends and family. A picture, or video clip, that shows...I was here!! This helps build up the hype, viewership, and attendance overall.
Are they going to outright block access to the streaming apps' servers (hello VPN/Proxy!), or make everyone take out their smartphone and prove they don't have Periscope installed on it before they are let in the door?
Shorter story here : since analog over-the-air broadcasts have been turned off, I've never bothered with TV again. I grew up with SECAM TV, which if the reception is fine is basically DVD quality, so digital TV wasn't that exciting. You get to use a flimsy piece of shit external tuner next to the TV, two remotes instead of one and switching channels takes a lot longer.
When there were six channels with instant switching, you could get an idea of what's going on in ten seconds.
An LCD TV with built-in tuner gets you back to a single remote and you might simply ignore most channels.. but if you just want a very cheap and small TV, the excessive width of 16:9 makes the vertical height very small. So it's wasting width space while feeling like a 14" CRT, except that the picture and sound quality are inferior on tow end LCD.
Seriously? No GIFs? Without GIFs lots of us would never have seen the lovely, bouncy, bouncy Michelle Jenneke in Barcelona.
The IOC can fuck right off.
Not necessarily in response to this, but because I want to, I have banned all Olympics TV coverage from my home. Not one single moment of it will appear on any TV, tablet, phone, laptop, roku, talking trout on the wall or written in blood on the walls.
The IOC is corrupt and full of shit and the USOC is right up there with them. They can all go to hell. But meanwhile, I won't watch and I won't spend a dime on sponsored stuff. Because any business who'd sponsor this is either stupid for ignoring the crimes these people have pulled, or they don't care. Either way. I can buy or use some other brand of everything. Easily.
Sig for hire.
It is all about money anyway, this is just as staggeringly insane as wanting to prohibit photographing art in public spaces, stop paying attention to them and keep your old electronic cameras so you don't get caught by not being able to take photo's in places due to newly issued patents in camera tech by companies like apple
As if I wanted to want a bunch of amateurs run around and play stupid games... fuck you IOC.
The IOC? Hell no, sell it to the highest bidder. Can you imagine "The Coca Cola Mountain Range" in every atlas, on every globe...?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yip, therefor every country that now hosts the Olympics is required to add a law to exclusively trademark the word Olympic (and derivatives) to the IOC.
The last few years many greek restaurants, even ones that had the name Olympic for more than 50 years, had to change their name.
The Olympics aren't the only problem though, remember the Dutch girls that were arrested in during the VIVA worldcup because they where wearing dresses with the Heineken logo on it (you got those dresses when you bought a case of beer).
You can encode movies into ASCII animation, also 3D movies! I would love to see olimpic games on my old VT220 terminal...
Internet Of Coercion ? (or is it Bayerische Motoren Werke ?)
The IOC's olympic games aren't the only way to have sports competitions.
It's probably too late for this year, but I'd love to see some of the athletes raise money (crowdfunding?) to move their competition somewhere else, and not have anything to do with the IOC. Just hold their competition on their own.
For example, for the sports that are scheduled to take place in polluted water - raise money for those athletes to drop out of the Olympic competitions, and to move to another location with clean water. If these alternate games were not held at the same time as the IOC's Rio games, then some news organizations would cover the alternate games.
Unfortunately doing this in the next two weeks would probably break some rules, and might set up the athletes for a lawsuit, besides disappointing spectators who paid to see those sports in Rio. But if some athletes could set up alternate games in the future, then great.
I wish that was an option in Denmark. Both of the major OTA TV channels are playing the Olympics non-stop, this after a summer of being full of Vuelta-something-España and Tour de France.
Movies? Oh, every Friday night one of the channels has a 'vote' for a movie from the 70s, 80s, or 90s.
Me thinks they're out of money.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Corrupt bunch of douchebags.
EOM
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Nurse! Prepare the injection immediately!
go f* themselves.
thank you
How much cocaine did Rede Globo TV paid for that?
Go. Fuck. Yourselves.
If those proud parents wanted to post anything, they should have signed a contract with the IOC and outbid all the combined broadcast companies in the world.
They had the same opportunity as every other entity. And the attendeed should just be lucky they are allowed to go. Complain and they can go home. Do you listen to your pigs complain when you bring them to the slaughterhouse? They are property.
Are you a comunist or what?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
What good is it to pay so much money for tickets and travel to see the events if you can't even brag about it?
I bet you also refuse to watch rented VHS tapes anymore because they closed all the rental outlets.
If they returned it to the original Greek format (naked), I might be interested. Otherwise... yawn.
Watch beach volleyball. They're getting pretty close. A really aggressive game of "keep the balloon from hitting the floor" isn't interesting enough by itself so they mandated bikinis as the required uniform. A little T&A never hurt ratings right?
Ahh! "word" not "work". *sigh*
Thank GOD that slashdot doesn't allow any super-advanced features like editing a post, even for a 2-minute period after posting. Because that would just be pandering to its users, eh?
Seriously, slashdot- get your shit together and let people edit a fucking post. If you're worried about malicious edits, make posts editable for some short period after they've been posted. A couple of minutes would do it, just long enough to fix a typo or something.
Now, cue the anal-retentive douche bags who'll feel that this idea is crazily permissive or something.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You miss the terrorists attack on the Israeli athletes? There is a movie and a few documentaries about it.
You joke, but the Olympic Mountains are actually referenced in the United States code related to the Olympic Committee. Based on my reading (IANAL) it seems that it would be illegal to name a new skiing business after the mountains if it didn't exist before 1998.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
While it's almost certainly not permitted to broadcast your own play-by-play in real-time, you can certainly give those accounts at a later time.
You can however broadcast a play-by-play of the broadcast without permission. Oh, they could bring a lawsuit over it but I think you'd be on safe legal ground. That's basically what media companies do all the time. Nothing illegal about real time second hand report of events. ABC is under no obligation to kowtow to NBC regarding reporting facts as long as they don't use copyrighted materials or trademarks without permission.
MLB prohibits using the calls by the announcers without permission.
MLB can claim to prohibit whatever they want but unless you are actually rebroadcasting the calls themselves (or a reasonable facsimile of them) then they can't do shit about you reporting what happened in the game itself.
They're part of the broadcast, so it's logical that they would be subject to copyright.
Of course they are just like any performance would be. But I can report on the performance as long as my report doesn't resemble what is being performed.
Then NBC should contract with ISIS to make sure there's a terrorist event. Nothing glues eyeballs to the TV like something blowing up and killing some athletes.
I mean, when you're spending 1.29 Billion, what's another million or two to make sure somebody gets killed on live TV? Didn't you folks ever see the movie "Network" ?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
My friend, you don't need a "fancy new set": a "new set" will suffice. Seriously, you can get a 32" 720p TV for $120, which would be a good replacement for any 26" 4:3 tube. Stop being so curmudgeonly.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
... GOOD, because who cares about the Olympics anyway? The less I hear/see about it the better... ...BAD, corporate Nazis suck.
"expressly prohibited"
Brazil, as a signatory to the Berne Convention, makes this perfectly legal no matter what the IOC says.
Jew detected.
. . . when it comes to photography/filming in public places. If I am standing on a public beach taking video of the sailing event, then the IOC/NBC/youtube can go fuck themselves.
During the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, stores with "Olympic" in their name were forced to cover up the "Olympic" part. It's a common store name because there's an Olympic Blvd in Los Angeles (ironically renamed after the 1932 Olympics), so a lot of stores on that street incorporate it into their name - Olympic Car Repair, Olympic Printing, etc.). I hear the same thing happened in Atlanta and Salt Lake City, though fewer businesses were affected since AFAIK they don't have an Olympic St/Blvd/Ave.
Eating will be prohibited at the Olympics too. Well, you can eat, but only hot dogs made by Olympia meats.
Also, breathing is out. Everyone breathes Olympic brand canned air. It's for, er, safety.
Want to go to the toilet? You have to pee through the holes in the Olympic logo, attached to the seat of the official Olympic toilets.
That's what the preview is for... now if you don't proofread it's your own fault!
your box doesn't have the good ol' NTSC (ch 3 or 4) output on it? mine does, AND contains the captions too. and the dvr just loves it.