The International Olympics Committee has been using copyright infringement claims to suppress videos of the event on YouTube

Nodar Kumaritashvili making the fatal run

digitivity.org As you might have heard, Georgian luge slider Nodar Kumaritashvili died in luge training at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver on February 12.

If you look at the result for the top YouTube hit on on Google video search for “luge death“, that video has been deleted by YouTube due to a copyright claim by the IOC.

That’s the same story for a lot of the results for the videos you get if you search for “luge death” on YouTube.

The IOC has also been trying to remove a video put up by blogger Steve Pate at Not Just the News Network. However, the videos were still up at the time of this post.

Interestingly, the Huffington Post and CBS News seem to still be hosting the video, with the former also showing pictures.

My comments

By all accounts, the luge track was ridiculously dangerous, and faster than it had ever been before. With lugers reaching speeds of 95 miles per hour, many commented that they were being treated like crash-test dummies. (See the picture at NJNN.)

This was a tragic death but the IOC’s attempts to suppress the videos of it are pathetic, wrong, and immoral. The IOC has just gotten so used to controlling anything and everything remotely connected to the Olympics, the word “Olympic”, or any competitors, that I think it’s on autopilot as far as automatically using DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notices regardless of the newsworthiness of a brief excerpt, which is all that the NJNN blog used.

First of all, the only reason that the IOC could possibly think that they could tell someone to post or not post content relating to the Olympics is the copyright laws. In the US, anyway, the copyright laws are based on the copyright clause of the Constitution

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

So how does the Olympic committee censoring the luge tragedy videos promote the useful arts?

I reject the idea that the video needs to be banned out of respect for the luger’s family. If anything, the video needs to be spread far and wide to show the Olympic organizers’ culpability in putting up unbelievably low barriers on the sides of the luge course.

Isn’t it strange that there’s supposed to be a separate category of people (reporters) who are authorized to view primary sources, and they they’re supposed to tell us what happened, but we can’t see for ourselves? That worked for the newspaper and TV era, but with the Internet, there’s no reason at all for people not to be able to see the actual news occurring and make up their minds for themselves instead of hearing newsmen debate current events.

Finally, under Canadian law (Steve Pate is Canadian, and NNJN is a Canadian site), there is explicit permission under the law to use brief excerpts under “fail dealing” (the Canadian version of “fair use”).

Other blogs following the story include TechDirt and Michael Geist. Discussion at Slashdot. Direct download link for the video.