Sharing And Selling

A few of you have probably noticed that there have been some sporting shenanigans going on across the Channel over the last few weeks - and what a cracker the Rugby World Cup turned out to be.

Notwithstanding England’s Lazarus-like performance in reaching the final against all odds, some of the best drama of the tournament arrived at the quarter-final stage, when the mercurial French team faced up to the supposedly all-conquering All Blacks’ Haka.

So when, a few days later, I spotted a link on the Guardian’s sport website to footage of the moment on YouTube, I thought I’d take another look – but when I clicked through, I found that it has been removed ‘due to a copyright claim by the Rugby World Cup.’

The tournament’s media rights, or lack of them, had already been a major talking point, with disagreements emerging before it began between the organisers and various media outlets about what access they could and couldn’t have to images and footage.

This ended up with various newspapers running pictures with their reports on the Cup’s opening game that had nothing to do with the actual match, as a protest against what they saw as unfair restrictions on those organisations that weren’t ‘official RWC partners’.

Whilst establishing a copyright claim over TV footage would seem to be fair enough, it seems to rather ignore the selling power of the Internet – and if nothing else, the Rugby World Cup aims to sell the game to the biggest possible worldwide audience.

Looking elsewhere on YouTube, you can find all sorts of footage from a wide range of people with products to sell, such as, in a rather different area, the slightly odd and truly splendid comedy of The Mighty Boosh.

Putting those words into the site’s search engine brings up (as I write) 915 different items, many of which are sketches that were made with BBC licence payers’ money.

You might think that these would therefore fall under the same copyright protection, but it’s clearly been recognised by the BBC that making these sketches easily available for viewing, sharing and recommending by fans old and new will help to create a whole new audience for watching future series, buying DVDs etc etc.

I’m sure that, if I’d spent a few more seconds searching the Internet, I could have found the footage of the Haka that I was looking for in some form or other, which would illustrate something that media outlets and many other companies in the sector are continuing to grapple with – that an awful lots of what they want to sell to you is out there for free if you look hard enough.

I just wish I could find some footage of Jonny Wilkinson’s winning drop-goal from the 2007 RWC final….

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