How Copyrights Ruined the Olympics and What You Can Learn From It

It wasn't copyright that ruined the Olympics. Copyright was just one tool that was used in service of ruining them.

The real ruiner is advertising. When a business makes most, or all, of its money from advertising and sponsorships that business necessarily becomes beholden to the desires of those sponsors. Companies that take advertising very rarely, if ever, say no to their sponsors, so sponsors have gotten into the habit of making whatever ludicrous and extreme demands they can come up with, because they know the answer will be yes. This is how you get a situation where Visa is the only credit card accepted on the Olympic grounds.

In the land of journalism, in magazines and newspapers, it is an ethics violation to have the advertisers influence the content. Even then, it still happens all the time, as in video game journalism. The Olympics is not a journalistic institution. It can do whatever its advertisers ask. Since each of the advertisers is paying such an enormous amount of money, without which the Olympics would not exist, the sponsors effectively own the Olympics. Even if the organizing committees would rather not do as the sponsors say, they are afraid to say no. The sponsors know that even though their demands are extreme, it mostly makes the Olympics look bad, not themselves.

I see this same thing happening in many ad-supported companies. The advertisers have more decision making power than the CEO. It's a great deal. You get to effectively own a company without actually taking any of the risks, or doing any of the work, associated with actually owning the company. And the cost of sponsorship is a lot less than the cost of buying stock.

The Olympics wasn't ruined but it was crippled from becoming what it could have been. Everybody who wasn't officially organising it was shunted into the category of watching and being entertained.

The population was treated like sheep. This is actually true if you experienced the one-way systems and barriers in the public transport system and figuratively true if you experienced the TV coverage.

There was so little opportunity for collaboration. For local councils and pubs to organise their own special olympic celebrations. Local shops couldn't innovate and offer olympic specials.

During the Royal Wedding and the Royal Jubilee (Queen 60 years on throne) the general public and so many businesses made the celebration their own. It was really quite joyful. The olympics had an opportunity to incorporate that but instead went down the big corporate event path.

It's interesting, as I live in London and, even after getting a bit angry about how strong the copyright police were being, would have to admit that the Olympics were a resounding success. Everybody I met who was previously cynical grew to love the event, the city was absolutely rocking, the park was tremendous and the worst thing about it was the subsequent downer the city is now on.

Ruined is a bit strong, I guess is what I mean.

When I hear stories of NBC paying over a --billion dollars-- for TV rights and then hear about an Irish gymnast who had to scrounge and fundraise just to get there, I wonder what the "Olympic Spirit" is really all about.

Note for non-British readers: Boris Johnson is the Mayor of London, not the Lord Mayor of London. The latter is a largely ceremonial and supportive role concerned only with the ancient City of London, the square mile containing the financial district.

Left a comment on the original article but it was removed. Disappointing to see such pointless inaccuracy on a website devoted to a subject where nuance and precision count for so much. I could have understood getting it wrong the other way round, but the author - a lawyer educated in the UK - had to actually add a word in to make it incorrect.

In the age of austerity, it's great that governments are still willing to commit huge amounts of taxpayer money to subsidize corporates sporting events.

As a Londoner I think saying the corporate non-sense spoiled the Olympics is very much overstating the facts.

Yes, it left a slightly bitter after taste. Yes I'd have liked local businesses to be able to cash in to some extent on the Olympics. But seriously, it was a great event, something I will probably never see again in my lifetime and I'm glad to have witnessed it.

Unfortunately it would be really difficult to put on an event of such magnitude without sponsorship, and if everyone can associate themselves with the games then I'm sure that would ultimately reduce the value of that sponsorship.

Basically a competition between countries with large populations to pull athletes from, those with well-funded training programs, and Usain Bolt. Other than the fact that the local NBC affiliate pushed it hard, and we tuned in to see if David Tennant would light the torch (time can be rewritten) I can't say that I paid much attention.

Agreed. I had a lot of trouble finding relevant Olympic video online. For example, it took a good amount of searching to find some clips of the Badminton scandal, even a day after the occurrence. Youtube was particularly unhelpful as, I'm sure, it was policed extra hard.

What ruined the Olympics and still ruins pretty much all good things related to copyright is putting money above everything else.

Huh.

I really liked the Olympics. And almost all the "normals" I know did, too.