Twitter user's account shut down after posting Olympic videos
The IOC rules are militantly firm and relatively clear: No one can go near video footage or GIFs of anything that happens during the Olympics without paying for it.
Their 6-page diktat opens with a typically verbose marathon of a sentence that aims to cover every conceivable eventuality or loophole:
The IOC governs the Olympic Movement and owns the rights to the Olympic Games and all related events including, all intellectual property rights in and to the Olympic Games and all goodwill associated therewith, as well as all other rights, titles and interest of every kind and nature relating to the organisation and staging of the Olympic Games, including the broadcast, coverage and exhibition of the Olympic Games and any other form of exploitation, recording, representation, marketing, reproduction, access and dissemination thereof by any means or mechanism whatsoever, whether now existing or developed in the future.
And woe betide anyone who doesn't listen. Particularly if you're a Venezuelan blogger with 42,000 followers on Twitter.
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While most media and many social media users have abided by the IOC's demands, some haven't.
Take Luigino Bracci Roa, who tweets as @Lubrio. This is how his account looks today:
Bracci says that his account has been suspended by Twitter at the request of the IOC after he posted a handful of short video clips from the Olympics. As Ars Technica reports, his dispatches were short (under 90 seconds).
They featured, according to Bracci in a blog post on the topic: "the passage of the Venezuelan delegation at the opening of the Games;" "a fragment of the competition of two Venezuelan swimmers;" and "the error of an interpreter."
That doesn't sound like something to particularly worry public broadcaster Social Venezuelan Television (TVES), which bagged the domestic rights for the 2016 event. Still, they were enough for the IOC to ask Twitter to remove the material, Bracci says, and for Twitter to suspend his account altogether.
In his lengthy post about the incident, Bracci says that he wasn't making money from the clips and he received no warning from either the IOC or the social media platform. He claims that his short posts are legal under local law and also draws comparison between the treatment he received and a perceived lack of response to people tweeting about, say, killing the current Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.
Mashable reached out to Twitter for comment. The company didn't respond to questions about this specific case but replied with a link to its copyright policy, from which it pasted some sections highlighted yellow into the email:
Twitter will respond to reports of alleged copyright infringement, such as allegations concerning the unauthorized use of a copyrighted image as a profile or header photo, allegations concerning the unauthorized use of a copyrighted video or image uploaded through our media hosting services, or Tweets containing links to allegedly infringing materials.
Under appropriate circumstances, Twitter may suspend and warn repeat violators, and in more serious cases, permanently terminate user accounts.
The IOC has yet to respond.
Tim Chester was Senior Editor, Real Time News in Los Angeles. Before that he was Deputy Editor of Mashable UK in London. Prior to joining Mashable, Tim was a Senior Web Editor at Penguin Random House, helping to relaunch the Rough Guides website and other travel brands. He was also a writer for Buzzfeed, GQ and The Sunday Times, covering everything from culture to tech and current affairs. Before that, he was Deputy Editor at NME.COM, overseeing content and development on the London-based music and entertainment site. Tim loves music and travel and has combined these two passions at festivals from Iceland to Malawi and beyond.
