Another story about the Olympic committee's crackdown on athlete diaries and the like: "Franklin Servan-Schreiber, the director of communications and new media for the International Olympic Committee, is keenly aware of the tension between property rights and unfettered coverage of the Games. But, he said, 'I don't think the I.O.C. can be seen in any way limiting speech about the Olympics.'" Okay, you're not limiting speech, you're just telling people they can't, um...speak? This, from the same article, was also interesting:

Earlier this year, Nascar, the stock-car racing league, backed off an attempt to make reporters agree that Nascar was sole owner of "images, sounds and data arising from and during any Nascar event" — including the racing times and scoring information. "They were saying, 'If it happens during the event, we own the intellectual property rights to it,'" said Michael Persinger, the sports editor of The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina, the epicenter of the Nascar universe. "You can't own the news."

As pointed out recently in a Metafilter thread about this issue, the I.O.C. certainly has every right to make the athletes agree to certain rules in order to compete. Whether or not it seems stupid to enforce this particular rule is not a free speech or copyright issue, legally speaking. What I haven't heard anything about is attempts to limit attendees reportage. I wonder what the I.O.C. is doing in terms of non-officially-approved "reporters" who just happen to be there (with the Blogger AvantGo client on their Palm ;).


Of course, one must understand the I.O.C.'s concerns. This is a non-profit organization that depends on broadcasting fees for a large part of the money it requires to operate. The threat to that income is naturally going to be taken seriously and attempted to be controlled. But the assumption that athlete's diaries being published to the web is going to decrease the value of, for example, television rights, is illconceived. How much more likely are you to tune into an event on television when you've been reading the athlete's personal account and, therefore, grown to "know" that person over time? Full-screen, broadcast quality video over the net may be another concern, but we're not there yet. And even when we are, the guy with a Hi8 videocam and a homepage is not going to have the equipment, positioning, and access that those paying for it will.