These days, you can see the Olympic rings literally everywhere. However, the symbol is an intellectual property of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and so is all the sports content we see every day. Apart from strictly geoblocking the content shared online by the respective broadcasters, the IOC, understandingly so, puts great effort into tackling all the illegal sources that share live streams or recordings of sports broadcasts.
Broadcasting licenses are very pricey and difficult to obtain given the competition in the broadcasting market. Therefore, the IOC has sent thousands of DMCA takedown notices to Google over the past week, TorrentFreak reports.
In 2008, the IOC clashed with the infamous Pirate Bay – which even temporarily changed its name to The Beijing Bay – in an effort to take down illegally shared sports content. However, it seems that 16 years later torrents are not the main cause of headaches. The modern culprit? Shady live streaming websites.
As TorrentFreak pointed out, torrents take time to appear and download, while live streams have the potential to compete with the official, often paid (depending on the broadcaster) broadcasts. Therefore, the IOC partnered with anti-piracy company Friend MTS to handle the thousands of DMCA requests necessary to safeguard the financial interests of broadcasters and the IOC itself.
Just by the end of July, the IOC has asked Google to remove more than 5,900 URLs from its search engine. More followed the next days and the list was dominated by pirate streaming sites, claims TorrentFreak as it didn’t identify a single torrent site.
The strict geoblocking of the Olympic content is also troubling for those abroad not speaking English (or the country’s respective language) who want to watch the Games legally but can’t access the online streams of their home broadcaster due to legal limitations. Luckily for those affected, they can still watch the major sports event by using something like a VPN.
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