Many work to find the famous Twitter egg replacing the pretty World Cup logo

Jul 7, 2014 13:27 GMT  ·  By

FIFA’s anti-piracy efforts are taking a ridiculous turn. Not only is the international football organization working to take down live streams for the matches, but it seems that people’s Twitter avatars are also being targeted.

Twitter has recently started to remove the profile pictures of several of its users after receiving complaints from FIFA. The reason? They were “wearing” World Cup-related logos and other pictures as their avatars.

This, apparently, is strictly forbidden by FIFA because it fears that other people using their logos and emblems may cause it serious damage. Taking things one step further, FIFA seems to be under the belief that this will actually endanger the entire worldwide football community, as it was revealed in an official statement.

“FIFA’s official logos, symbols and other graphic trade marks may not be used on any social media platform. FIFA’s Protected Terms may not be used to create the impression that a page is officially related to the 2014 FIFA World Cup,” FIFA notes.

Therefore, since Twitter is part of this social media world that frightens the FIFA dinosaurs so much, it has been asked to take action against several users by removing their infringing profile pictures. Imagine the surprise of these users when they find the famous egg as an avatar, instead of the World Cup they probably love so much and want to show support for.

The list includes the World Cup emblem, the logo and even the trophy, and it appears that Twitter has honored some of the requests already, although this will likely be an ongoing operation, since many are certainly going to put up the avatar again, much to FIFA’s despair.

While some of the accounts were related to football in some way or another, random users weren’t forgiven either.

FIFA has been working to prevent illegal live streams of the matches from reaching the Internet. The international body has announced its intention to take down such streams as soon as they are discovered, but they haven’t really been successful. In fact, by the time the stream was discovered, the request to take it down forwarded and all steps taken care of, the match was already over.

TV networks that have obtained rights to broadcast the matches have started a crusade on their own, taking down even Google sites that are obviously perfectly legitimate or Dotcom’s Mega.