Aug 01, 2024 13:00:00

The International Olympic Committee has sent nearly 1,000 DMCA takedown notices to Google in the past week to protect broadcasting rights

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is committed to protecting intellectual property rights. In addition to protecting the Olympic symbol and the word 'Olympic' itself, the IOC is particularly committed to protecting the broadcasting rights of each Olympic event, and it has been reported that in July 2024 alone, it requested the removal of thousands of URLs under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) .

IOC Sends Thousands of DMCA Notices to Deter 'Olympics' Piracy * TorrentFreak
https://torrentfreak.com/ioc-sends-thousands-of-dmca-notices-to-deter-olympics-piracy-240731/

The IOC has made various efforts to protect Olympic broadcasting rights in the past, and during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it asked the Swedish government for cooperation in blocking torrent sites that provided Olympic-related videos. In addition, during the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, a Venezuelan user who posted Olympic videos on Twitter (now X) received a complaint from the IOC. When the user countered that 'up to seven videos under 90 seconds are legal in Venezuela,' Twitter sent a 'notice of account suspension.'

Twitter freezes accounts of users who tweeted Olympic videos - GIGAZINE

By carlbob

Copyright infringement is also a problem for the 2024 Paris Olympics, but unlike before, live streaming portals are seen as a threat rather than torrent sites. According to French news agency L'Informe , organizations including the IOC began taking legal action against major providers around mid-July, but a list of problematic pirate sites and services was compiled in April 2024. As a result, the Paris Court of Justice issued a blocking order limited to 25 domain names in France.

In order to further strengthen its crackdown more broadly and reliably, the IOC has asked Friend MTS, a copyright infringement prevention service, to cooperate and begin making requests for removal under the DMCA. According to TorrentFreak, a media outlet that covers file sharing topics, the IOC's DMCA removal requests to Google amounted to 5,907 in about a week at the end of July 2024.

Along with the removal request, the IOC issued a warning that read, 'All rights to the Olympic Games and Olympic property, in particular the audiovisual content produced for the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games, are owned by the IOC. Such Olympic content may not be transmitted or communicated via the Internet or any other interactive or electronic media without the prior express written authorization of the IOC. Our records show that no such authorization has been granted to you.'

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