Olympics: Really for All the World to See?

With the London 2012 Olympic Games currently underway, having started as of Friday 27th July, viewers across the world are tuning into their television sets to make sure that they don't miss their favourite event, be it swimming, shooting, hockey (my personal fave) or indeed any of the other 36 sports that comprise the modern Olympic Games.

But being that we are in the "modern age", indeed, that we are in the modern age of technology, why is  it that there are such a strict set of guidelines on what elements of the Games can and can't be uploaded over the Internet?

Here's how it all started: I'm going to assume that you all watched the opening ceremony. Maybe not at 6am but perhaps in the afternoon when it was repeated around 3 o'clock. Well, my brother, dad and myself are those kind of crazy people who get up early of a morning any way so we had no problem getting up early to watch it live at 6. I really liked it and so did my brother. Our favourite part was Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean playing the keyboard for "Chariots of Fire". My brother tried to look it up on YouTube and watch it again. However, when he attempted to do this, locating a video he thought would work, a message of some similar description to "This video has been deleted due to copyright infringements" appeared. Then today, in the process of writing this post, I looked up the same set of words again. I found a video that worked except several sections of the clip had been cut and chopped and moved about, different from how I remember them being on the actual event.

Now, I understand about the copyright laws and privacy policies attached to uploading content onto the Internet. Maybe not as much as I should know, but I understand the basic idea behind it. But I've never really considered the power that an institute or an organisation has such that they can just demand that a video be removed. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) are very strict indeed when it comes to knowing their rights, whether it be against content on the Internet, or in dealing with companies who want to use the Olympic logo (the five rings) for some promotional campaign. And with a logo that was recognised by more than 93% of the world in 2001, I'm pretty sure you have to be that guarded when it comes to who uses your symbol, your footage, basically everything that constitutes you as an organisation.

It's a very interesting topic for me, something that I guess I really hadn't given that much thought to apart from what I knew. Everything that I've uploaded has been either original content or something that I've specified where it came from, placed a reference at the bottom of the page or something. So this is something that I can say with confidence I'm looking forward too throughout this course. Finding out more about the legality side of the Internet and indeed the Web.

Who knows. Maybe I'll learn how to source down a legit copy of Mr. Bean at the Olympics!


Image available: http://questgarden.com/97/47/3/100301103814/