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According to the Associated Press, the Olympics (TM) will be available live online, but only outside the U.S.
The International Olympic Committee is permitting more than a dozen broadcasters to show video of the Aug. 13-29 Olympics online. But the footage will be highly restricted to protect lucrative broadcast contracts, which are sold by territory -- $793 million paid by NBC alone. Web sites must employ technology to block viewers from outside their home countries, so U.S. Web surfers won't benefit from the BBC's live coverage. They'll have to settle for highlights posted after NBC broadcasts, which are already largely tape-delayed.
Gotta love what commercial sponsorship deals have done to the games of "peace" and "universal moral principles." Sites offering video of the games will apparently be required "to keep footage within geographic boundaries." We all know geolocation is flawed, though. When I browse with the tor anonymizing proxy for example, I frequently get German Google pages because many of the onion routners' exit nodes are in German-speaking countries.
Meanwhile, NBC, on whose behalf these restrictions are being instituted, won't win any gold medals yet. Its promised HDTV University guide to HDTV coverage of the games is "coming soon" with only a week for would-be students to learn. (Thanks PVRblog.)
Via Boing Boing, Cathy Guthrie, Woody's granddaughter, says she loves the JibJab parody of her grandfather's song.
I can speak for myself and my immediate family including my Dad, that we all love it! We've all seen it and passed it along to our friends and family. It's incredibly clever, funny and a nice break from the heavy tones of politics going on right now.... That parody was made for you and me.Arlo Guthrie has said he likes the parody too.
Copyright being what it is, however, what Arlo and Cathy think doesn't matter. Nor even what Woody would think were he still alive. Once an author has transferred copyright, barring a termination of transfer, the author's wishes are irrelevant. Woody Guthrie, like many authors publishing commercially, had probably transferred what rights he had to his publisher for contractual royalites, but leaving his heirs no say in the uses allowed of his works. The alienability of rights may be better than the European droit d'auteur, from which an author can't escape even if he or she wants to, but it probably wasn't foremost in the minds of the Congress that passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act 'for the children.' It's worth remembering, again, that artists and copyright holders aren't always the same people.