London 2012 Olympics Win Gold Medal For Cluelessness By Banning Video And Photo Uploads To Social Media During Games
from the gotta-protect-those-brands dept
As Techdirt has reported, the London 2012 Olympics bring with them a range of “special” measures guaranteed to make London a place for lovers of freedom to avoid this summer. But it seems that the organizers wish to ensure that anyone attending will also have a rather miserable time:
Fans in the crowd won’t be allowed to upload snippets of the day’s action to YouTube — or even, potentially, to post their snaps from inside the Olympic Village on Facebook. And a crack team of branding “police”, the Games organisers Locog have acknowledged, will be checking every bathroom in every Olympic venue — with the power to remove or tape over manufacturers’ logos even on soap dispensers, wash basins and toilets.
The same thing happened four years ago in Beijing as well, when non-sponsor brands were taped over in bathrooms so they didn’t get “a free ride.” That’s because the real focus of the Olympic games is not anything the athletes might be doing, but keeping sponsors and business partners happy.
With just a little more than three months to go until the opening of the London 2012 Games, attention is increasingly turning to what many legal experts consider to be the most stringent restrictions ever put in place to protect sponsors’ brands and broadcasting rights, affecting every athlete, Olympics ticket holder and business in the UK.
That’s desperately sad. What is supposedly the greatest sporting event in the world could have been turned into the ultimate demonstration of how social media let spectators become participants through the real-time sharing of experiences.
Instead, the London 2012 organizing committee’s obsession with policing brands and controlling what audiences do means that the recently-unveiled motto for this summer’s games — ‘Inspire a generation’ — could hardly have been more inappropriate.
The young people that are meant to be inspired by the London games will find themselves forbidden to use properly the very means that would have let them do that: the social networks where they share their most important moments. As a result, London 2012 looks likely to be the most petty-minded and joyless Olympics so far.
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Filed Under: beijing, london, olympics, sponsorship
Comments on “London 2012 Olympics Win Gold Medal For Cluelessness By Banning Video And Photo Uploads To Social Media During Games”
Who DIDN'T see this coming???!!!
Yet another sad, disturbing and pathetic example of big media squashing free expression.
I’m rather curious as to how they’re planning on enforcing it. Is it going to be a fine/penalty, or a more general ISP block?
On that side note, are ISPs in the UK required to cooperate with police?
I served on the board of directors of a sports organization that dealt, on a regular basis, with the IOC.
They are absolutely, completely. unswervingly focused on one thing: image. NOTHING gets decided until there’s a full evaluation of how it look on TV, in print, on the web. Everything is secondary to it: cost, athlete safety, spectator access, competitive balance, you name it, it’s never the first thing that comes up in any discussion. And it’s getting worse every Olympic cycle: I’ve been to the Games twice, and there is no way I’d go to London even if all expenses were paid. It’s all about corporate this and VIP that, branding this and ceremony that, and oh, right, someone DID mention something about a track event sandwiched in there somewhere…wait, who are those people in race bibs anyway? Are they important?
Like copyright, this is another that has been degraded from the original idea into what it now is. They need not hold their breath, I won’t be coming to this, nor the next as long as it is done that way.
Let them keep up their ideas of what is really important. It doesn’t jive with mine.
Not going to be there either, but it makes me want to go around and cover the official sponsor logos in the same way.
Makes Sense
This makes perfect sense to me. I can’t keep track of the number of times I’ve been in a restroom and looked down at the brand label on the urinal and thought to myself, “If these people just sponsored the Olympics, I’d buy one of these!”
Exactly how will they stop all of this uploading of footage?
Yawn
This is going to be so lame. It almost guarantees that nobody will give a shit.
It’s supposed to joy of the athletes, not the public. This is a big story made out of nothing. People just want to complain… Sure, they went overboard. So what? The ICO “owns” the event, they can decide what they want.
Now take that wasted energy and go put it on the ridiculous governments, and they stupidest privacy-destroying, spy-enabling, retarded new laws and their entertainment sponsors. They’re trying to destroy civilization and you complain about games? At least make your bitching worth something. Energy better spent. Pick your fights.
Makes Sense
“Now this is the kind of brand I don’t mind pissing on.”
Re:
They passed a law allowing the police to enter your home to take down unapproved signs… so on a hunch imma say yes.
So why bother watching then?
Easy solution — ignore the olympics.
Epic Fail
This will be an epic fail. Not only will they piss everyone off. They can’t enforce it, either.
Re:
They won’t stop it going up.
They will force it to be taken down, they will then sue the uploader and try to get the ISP to drop them.
Then they will forget if they signed off on the rendition of the uploader to get the proper punishment in an approved reeducation camp.
So why bother watching then?
That’s easy to say if you live outside of London. For those that live in it, they’ll have to deal with this insanity as they go about their daily business.
Re:
What goes up, must come down?
Re:
“It’s supposed to joy of the athletes,”
Then, pray tell, WHY is it that even the ATHLETES can’t be seen in anything OTHER than corporate sponsored wear?
Re:
As they IOC has gotten them to pass overreaching laws destroying peoples privacy, spying on them, etc…
The IOC does have control of the event, but for a government to spend several million to make everything “right” for IOC standards (which they will not make back during the events or after), and then pass a series of laws to make this private group happy and help them protect their outdated expansive view of entitlement…
Gee they could be an **AA if you substitute athletes and artists.
Better question I guess is, for all of this money IOC takes in, why do athletes still have to get handouts to get the the event? Isn’t it supposed to be all about the athletes?
Wow just the like **AA’s…
Yawn
So you’re saying even approved, paid for brands of toilets won’t get used and recognized for their valuable sponsorship?
The great IOC clampdown..again
We had this happen at the Vancouver/Whistler Winter Games too. IOC inspired silly rules about who could do what where and DON’T YOU DARE take photos at events and post them online.
Of course, people with camera phones did just that. And posted them and the IOC went bonkers.
This after a four or five year lead up to the event where the IOC inspected the Metro Vancouver area to assure that absolutely nothing, even at the microscopic level it seemed, violated any one of their copyrights or trademarks.
Even to the point of trying to get a court enforced order on a pizza place that had been operating for over 40 years called Olympia Pizza. They failed.
I don’t know how successful they were at getting women and girls to change their names if they happened to be named Olympia.
I’m sure that they wanted to go after the name Olympic Peninsula in Washington State except that, perhaps, some bright lawyer or the US Console in Vancouver talked them out of it.
The games themselves were wonderful as were the athletes. The IOC got a gold medal for being completely and incredibly out of touch and micromanaging.
If they already can tape/destroy branding IN the arena, and now have established precedent that the nations have to use police to go onto private property in a radius around the games and remove anything that is ‘advertisement’, how much longer until they demand that the police be allowed to enter private property and strip branding since it provides advertising? That ‘Ford’ logo on your trunk, were just gonna have to sand that down, oh Lexus head ornament, pity they failed to pay this time.
Come to think of it, what are they going to do if you have a company vehicle with advertizing on the side? Does the anti-advertizing law allow them to “remove” the offending advertizing? Did the law actually place a limit on signs or value of property to be removed?
Of course, maybe I am too paranoid.
Re:
Well, since the Olympics megacorp demands and gets special, extremely draconian laws passed in the places the events are held, this “wasted energy” actually is being spent protesting ridiculous governments and their stupidest, privacy-destroying, spy-enabling, retarded new laws.
Or do you think this stuff only affects people actively participating in or watching the Olympics?
What I want to know is why the people of any city or country is willing to tolerate the presence of the Olympic games? Hosting them doesn’t make a lot of money for the locality once you deduct the expenses their presence brings, and it’s not even much of boost to image of the places, particularly amongst the younger people who generally view the Olympics as a joke and (worse) as a lengthy, boring commercial exercise.
Re:
…and yet we cannot, for some reason, get Senators and Congress-persons covered in the logos of their corporate masters, er, um, sponsors, I meant.
and copyright strikes again! if it aint approved, it wont happen! this is supposed to be the greatest sporting event that can take place on the planet and it only happens every 4 years. financially i bet it’s always a flop for one reason or another. why make it even worse by these types of restrictions?
Yawn
Correct! San-Jamar —who?
Epic Fail
This. I think “normal” people- i.e. people who don’t read up on this stuff- are going to be shocked by this. When cameras and tape recorders and video cameras weren’t in everyone’s cell phone, it was a lot easier to “ban” recordings.
Now, artists just grin and bear it, and try to minimize the disruption of jerks with their flashes if it’s appropriate. I know that I and my peers (even though we’re “old”) check out youtube videos of our favorite bands the morning after a show & post ’em on facebook, etc.
Imagine the word-of-mouth the IOC could get by embracing technology instead of trying to stuff the cell phone back into the rotary age.
that’s why I haven’t watched the Olympics since the 90’s…
it’s nothing more than global commercial program showing Coca Cola, Visa, and McDonalds 24/7…
The saddest thing about it is that they KNOW that lots of people are still gonna go and that most people participating don’t know or care about the shit that goes on behind the curtains.
Stupidity reigns
Seriously, none of this is a big surprise although the people running London 2012 might be particularly clueless. I mean these are the folks who wanted Keith Moon to play at the ceremony. Ya know.. that Keith Moon… from The Who… the one that’s been dead for 34 years…
http://gulfnews.com/news/world/uk/london-2012-organisers-wanted-keith-moon-to-play-1.1011094
New rules for democracy in London. You have rights, except when big stacks of money paid by someone else to take away your rights are involved, then screw your rights, this is capitalism and we need to make a profit somehow.
Re:
“Sure, they went overboard. So what? The ICO “owns” the event, they can decide what they want.”
Ok… if they want to do whatever they want then they can pay for the whole thing. My taxes have paid for this competition and I think their draconian rules and the impact it will have on my life in London and my enjoyment of the games is bullshit.
Re:
my great grandfather later in his life refused to watch the olympics and said it was just a business event and served no purpose other then to make money, and thats not how it was when he was younger when there was actual national pride involved rather then greed…
welcome to the modern world, its all about the Benjamins
WWE
Wait a minute! Did the camera crews of the Olympics start following athletes into the restrooms to go have it out with a rival athlete, sort of like “professional” wrestling?
Re:
The London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006* does let the police or “enforcement officers” enter private premises and remove advertising — and charge people for the privilege too.
I haven’t read the whole Act myself, but the branding guidelines say that, as an individual, I can say something along the lines of “I support London 2012”, but as a business I can’t as this could create an association between my company and the Olympics.
I believe that uploading photos to Facebook would be a civil offence, and LOCOG have said they are unlikely to prosecute people for this (though they do have the power to do so).
Branding guidelines
Extract of the Act
Guardian article discussing this further
* It’s just as well the Act was passed by parliament and not a private company, or its name may well be in contravention of the Act by creating an association between parliament and the Olympics.
Tats
Is somebody gonna have to put tape over their tattoos should they vaguely promote some brand or something?
Re:
if the IOC is so focused on image, how did they get the 2012 logo to look like Lisa giving a Blowjob?
Re:
Blah, blah, blah …
So why bother watching then?
Oh I agree however it has to start somewhere if (and this is the key if) people want it to change more than they are willing to put up with the direction things have been moving. Stop watching. Stop participating. Period. Not likely to happen of course. IF you are in London then it is problematic to this for this specific event. But there is an olympic event in 2 years where it will be less problematic for those in London to ignore.
Makes Sense
Nothing promotes elegance and prestige of a residential bathroom more than the choice to exclusively use a urinal for #1 and a toilet for #2.
Re:
maybe because the focus of the olympics is no longer on the sport events themselves but on the major blowjob that IOC is doing when “servicing” the Big Money Brands
Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Why would a sponsor actually appreciate efforts to make it less likely that people will be interested in the event they’re sponsoring?
And what about the IOC marketing team? “Hey unnamed corporation, sponsor the games and we’ll make sure no one sees them!”
mmm oh yeah Mcdonalds mmm yeah keep fucking me silly i love it
Easy solution to this problem
I’ve made my choice, which is to simply not watch the Olympics at all. The IOC is welcome to play all the branding games they want, but as the consumer I get the final choice to not choose their product and its associated advertising.
Branding problem solved.
Re:
Better question I guess is, for all of this money IOC takes in, why do athletes still have to get handouts to get the the event? Isn’t it supposed to be all about the athletes?
(I’m the same AC who referenced the IOC above.)
The athletes — unless they are (a) in a marquee sport and (b) medal favorites are very much an afterthought. The rules and qualifications are carefully engineered to result in competitions that look good on TV — and if that means raising the qualification standard so high that many countries can’t get anyone into an event, that’s exactly what they’ll do. Remember the Jamaica bobsled team? Remember Eddie the Eagle? The IOC hates that sort of thing. Whenever it crops up, they change the rules to minimize the chance that it’ll come up again.
The old ideal, that every country would send the best they had, and that they would all compete fairly to see who would win that day, is gone. At the 1996 Olympics (Atlanta), Bosnia sent 5 athletes in 5 sports…and 1 coach for all of them. The IOC, sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars, couldn’t be bothered to help.
So when you watch all the athletes parade in (if you do) and you see the relative sizes of the delegations, keep in mind that part of the driver for that is the population of the country, but part of it is wealth. And in many cases, athletes who deserve to be there aren’t — while of course there is always IOC money for another cocktail party or breakfast reception or whatever.
I had the privilege of meeting someone from one of those countries some years ago. He trained incredibly hard, under conditions that you wouldn’t believe if I told you. He had junk equipment — but that’s all his nation could come up with. And he competed HARD. No, he didn’t do very well…but is that important? He represented his country proudly, he competed fairly, and he gave his best. There is nothing else for any athlete to do.
I still watch, because of people like him.
Re:
“attention is increasingly turning to what many legal experts consider to be the most stringent restrictions ever”
Congratulations UK, you are less free than China.
Re:
Yep… but we have good company – so’s the US…..
Re:
Not that you really had a lot of option…. the whole ticketing system appeared to be a huge back-hander to Visa, combined with a huge stroke-job to the “important” people rather than, you know, letting the british public watch the games they paid for.
Re:
umm it is boring commercial exercise/event, this artical kinda highlights that
Who DIDN'T see this coming???!!!
Why bother to even support this at this point ?
Sorry but I would not give my support to this MAFIAA BS Event.
Hate to screw the People who worked hard to Compete but I will not break my Vows of Boycotting the MAFIAA.
Do you really want to see all your fave Sporting Events turn into this ?
Re:
if only, then we could see who they are really working for….because we damn well know its not the voting public.
Who has two thumbs and won’t be watching the 2012 Olympics?
This guy!
Re:
this isnt how they view it, in the eyes of the IOC and their sponsors, this is a marketing/money making event of epic proportions, nothing more, nothing less.
how much you wana bet the got masking tape ready if your waring a shirt that somehow “Advertises” something thats not giving them money?
Re:
Have heard a few people from OL 2004 complain about the restrictions in Beijing. Have heard a few potential participants of London 2012 pondering about just prioritizing differently since they fear for their sponsorship-situation.
Re:
I don’t know, but I do know NFL can block access to its app when you’re at a stadium.
Re:
There is a good opportunity for remixing video on YouTube! Write a program that takes video of politicians and puts corporate logos all over them like Nascar drivers and posts as a video response.
The olympics..
aren’t worth watching anymore. It’s no longer about sports, it is about money. It’s absolutely ridiculous the way the sponsors are allowed to do all kinds of stupid things. the way to win in the olympics is to spend huge amounts of money on specialized training, finding the right food/drug combinations that enhance performance while evading olympic drug rules, and doing anything you can to hurt your opponents.
Re:
Ditto.
So sad
As a kid…hell even into my early adulthood the Olympics have been something I just love. I’ve shed tears at opening/closing ceremonies. What the Olympics are SUPPOSED to represent are awesome and amazing. Hearing about shit like this just makes me sad though. These events should be shared openly with the entire world, not controlled and fed to us like all the other media out there. It’s supposed to be special! 🙁
So why bother watching then?
I’d have loved not to participate, unfortunately I had to pay for it instead.
Crap Hole
Its real simple. Don’t go ! Treat them like the content mafia and just boycott it , spend the money on something else.
These sad fucks want us to live in a world where everything we see and hear is ‘ owned ‘ by someone and we have to pay each time we want to consume or share it.
The UK is becoming a crap hole , it and the Olympics deserve each other.
The olympics..
There’s no question that huge amounts of money, specialized training, custom diets, and sometimes, banned drugs help performance. (In my role in the sports organization I was part of, I spent way too much time dealing with doping issues. Happily, I never needed to discipline an athlete, as the sport I was associated with is one where drugs simply won’t help, so nobody ever takes them. Yes, really.)
But in re this:
and doing anything you can to hurt your opponents.
In all the years that I’ve been loosely or tightly associated with a national sports organization, I’ve never seen that. Oh, not that all the athletes don’t want to win; of course they do. And not that all of them like each other: some do, some don’t. But there is an implicit, deep understanding that they want to win NOT because they hurt their opponents, NOT because their opponents had a bad day, NOT because they caught a lucky break, but because absolutely everything went right for their opponents…and they managed to win anyway.
My proudest finish as an athlete was a 4th-place. I won silver and bronze medals at the same competition, but that 4th place really meant something to me, because I did it against the toughest competitive field I’d ever faced, including the world champion — and I actually turned in a better performance in that event than in the ones in which I medaled.
This isn’t unique to me: talk to any high-level athlete in distance running or skiing or cycling or skating: when you win because everyone else fell short, it’s a hollow victory. You feel like you didn’t earn it. (Even though, factually, you did.) You can’t savor it the way you can when you grind out a victory, narrowly besting someone who could do the same to you tomorrow — and well might. It feels like a “show up” award, where you wound up winning simply because you were the last one standing. Athletes will take the victory when it’s there, of course, but they don’t want to win this way. Not really.
And beyond that: given the chronic shortage of funds in all but a few sports, athletes frequently train together. There are limited facilities, limited coaches, etc., so it makes sense for everyone to pool their resources and try to collectively improve. No athlete is going to try to hurt someone that they just spent the last 3 years, 6 days a week, 9 hours a day, training with.
And beyond THAT: there is no quicker way to lose every possible friend, every favor, every open door, every resource you could ever need, than to hurt someone else. Everyone knows that except, perhaps, a tiny few exceedingly arrogant people…and they learn the hard way. Quickly.
You may not see it all the time, but there are bonds of necessity, bonds of friendship, bonds of shared sacrifice that unite athletes — many times, even when their countries are fighting each other. THAT is the Olympic spirit and it lives despite the best attempts of the IOC to bury it under a mountain of advertising and self-aggrandizing bullshit.
So why bother watching then?
It’s the price you pay when you don’t fight.
You have to be kidding
Apart from this being an overkill response, it’s unenforcable. Will you be confiscating all cellphones during the games ? What about those who will be taking pics for their own private record of the games ? Anyone with an iPhone and 1/2 a brain will have photostream enabled, so by the time you can “persuade” them to unlock their phone and delete the photos they’re uploaded to the Cloud and to their home machines anyway.
Just stop being complete arsehats about it.
Why has no one asked where this guy got his info? This whole article sounds like b.s.
Re: Where this guy his his info?
So your response is simply “you lie”? Hardly convincing.
Try teh Google and check into it.
Not attending... or viewing... to reading...
Not that I planned to attend the Olympics, but now I won’t be watching on television nor reading articles nor viewing photos or participating in this corporate heist in any way, shape or form.
Screw ’em – they’re managing to drain every single ounce of joy out of life and it’s really pissing me off.
Re:
In the real world, nobody “owns” an event or an experience.
Not to mention, people pay big bucks to attend – that’s where the profit comes in. Turning the Olympics into a fascist rally doesn’t bode well for them or for us.
By the way, I’ll be paying attention to those “brands” – in fact, I’ll be researching them and that will be the last time I spend a cent on any of them.
clueless
I would have thought the best was to enhance the brand would be to have it saturating social media networks.
The olympics are the classic example of the centralised, control freak one-to-many broadcast model of traditional sports bodies. They profit from restricting information and access and requiring people to pay large amounts of money to watch mass market broadcasts.
That’s why, if anything, sporting organizations seem to be more copyright draconian than even Hollywood, trying to ban “unauthorized” reporting or photography of any kind.
It’s the complete anathema of the many-to-many social broadcasting of the internet, where everyone is a “source” and everyone is a “consumer.”
Now imagine if we started our own olympics where every athlete competed in their own home town and the winners were chosen by the posting of authenticated times, and all the footage just went straight up on YouTube…
Crap Hole
Didn’t get given the choice and thank you so much for bringing up such a painful subject. While you’re at it why don’t you give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice on it? 🙂
Preposterous
It has just turned into a commercial event. Hardly in the spirit of the original, I feel. I shall not be watching, following or having the slightest link with this event with its draconian rules and regulations.
Curse them
the Olympics BELONG TO THE WORLD, not London hosts who should just feel lucky to be hosting these Olympics.
Preposterous
And that’a damn shame because the kids and young adults that have given 500% of themselves to their sport have been compromised by politics again.
Who DIDN'T see this coming???!!!
It’s simple. Start emailing the sponsors, or stop buying their products.
I understand the desire to advertise, but if they think they are more important than the olympics, then I don’t want to fund their arrogance.
Curse them
I’m assuming that’s sarcasm. If not, you’re welcome to them.
thing is the reticence of all the athletes especially the british ones is kinda embarrassing for them as people, members of various communities, in the info age. draconian measures brought in by the ioc and the squeaky coalition in england supported by the racist popo and the athletes public voices remain still, says to me, culturally like, that sportsmen and women in britain have no concern for the lives of their audience.
i mean 4000 chauffeur driven beedubs going about in elite lanes whilst ambulances stuck in traffic, londoners are gonna love that.
Re:
I dont think the two needs to be separated, im sure if we looked back far enough up the chain, we’d find the two parts join up
WTF?????
Aren’t the Olympics being broadcast on TV? What’s the issue with people taking pics and uploading them? Is that ban just during the events or forever?
I guess these questions are irrelevant since people will go to the games and they will take pics and vids and they will share them. That’s what people do.
Fuck the IOC, either allow people to share their experiences or I suggest that free nations should start banning the Olympics.
Just had to say it again
Fuck the IOC! Either allow people to share their experiences or I suggest that free nations should start banning the Olympics.
Olympics is just a business and they banning promotion is good for them. Stop crying over this.
Re:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGTrWlzK3Ho- Better version.
So why bother watching then?
How about driving somewhere else in the country and taking a vacation where you spend your money elsewhere and make London less productive while enjoying a bit more freedom?
And just when I was planning to see it with the team.
So I cannot post our pics during the event? Boo. I’ll just make do and create tons of accounts and post them all over the net.
Re:
I wonder how this compares to the situation in Bejing during their ‘Athletic celebration of an Ancient Greek tradition named after the mountain where the gods resided’.
Oops, did I actually mention, Greece, someone might work out what I meant and think “Olympics” in their head, and thus infringe on this vital-to-the-UK-economy piece of IP!
Re:
It says a lot that even in Scotland, a rather football-mad nation, they can’t even sell a sizable fraction of the Olympic football tickets for the games played locally – because the Scots know what a joke the whole business is.
Maybe it’s preemptive, in case DOW is going to kill more Indian people with chemical plants, then try to block videos of it off of YouTube.
Re:
> The London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act
> 2006* does let the police or “enforcement officers” enter
> private premises and remove advertising — and charge
> people for the privilege too.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens the next time the US hosts an Olympic games. Most of these draconian laws couldn’t be passed here without a wholesale repeal of the Bill of Rights.
I wonder if our insistence on having an inviolable Constitution will automatically disqualify the US from hosting e Olympics from this point forward.
Re:
> The London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act
> 2006* does let the police or “enforcement officers” enter
> private premises and remove advertising — and charge
> people for the privilege too.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens the next time the US hosts an Olympic games. Most of these draconian laws couldn’t be passed here without a wholesale repeal of the Bill of Rights.
I wonder if our insistence on having an inviolable Constitution will automatically disqualify the US from hosting e Olympics from this point forward.