The 2010 Winter Olympics were off to a bad start as those following the event may already know after the fatal accident of a Georgian luger. The crash opens up a number of issues with the organizers and the track but it also opens up another unpleasant discussion as copyright is being abused, again, to keep video of the crash from popping up online. To no avail obviously, anyone who has tried to stop something from spreading online already knows this, but the Olympic Committee seems undeterred.
Videos which started showing up on YouTube shortly after the crash, as anyone expected them to do, were quickly pulled down by Google citing copyright infringement complaints. The videos are available in other places online and they will probably end on YouTube again for a short while until Google deals with that copy als well.
Truth be told, there's nothing inherently evil or unusual in this, the International Olympic Committee and Google most likely had some sort of understanding well ahead of time and Google may be just acting like it would with any other unauthorized clip from the Olympic. But, while you can defend that action on most accounts, in this particular case, things are trickier as the clip itself would have a very good case for it as 'fair use.'
Google would not comment on the particular video but offered this general
statement. "We approach each video individually, and we do not prescreen content. Instead, we count on our community members to know the Guidelines and to flag videos they think violate them. We review all flagged videos quickly, and if we find that a video does break the rules, we remove it, usually in under an hour."
And, interestingly enough, regular TV broadcasters, with no licensing agreement with the IOC, are employing the fair use argument and airing the clip. Yet YouTube, and other online outlets are so terrified of the constant bullying from content creators that they're not going to take any chance and are taking the video down. In the end, nobody wins, people don't have access to the information, online video sites lose viewers and trust from their users and the IOC comes out as trying to hush up an unpleasant situation and (mis)using copyright law to do so.
UPDATE: Vancouver Fatal Luge Crash Video Available on Bing
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