IRB e le foto del mondiale

[riccio]

Un articolo dell'Herald Tribune che spiega come l'International rugby Board ha imposto nuove regole restrittive per quanto riguarda la pubblicazioni di foto sui siti giornalistici mondiali per i prossimi mondiali:

PARIS: When the Pan American Games start in Brazil in July, thousands of top athletes will run, wrestle and leap, but they will not be able to indulge in one popular daily exercise: blogging.

Neither will their physicians, coaches or massage therapists, in a blanket ban affecting some 7,000 people during two weeks of competition ending July 29 in Rio de Janeiro.

That rule may make some participants wince in virtual pain, but it reflects a spreading trend among international sports institutions to impose vigorous controls over the online use of game information and photographs.

In February, a dispute broke out between the International Rugby Board and the World Association of Newspapers over new restrictions that will be imposed during the Rugby World Cup, which starts in Paris in September.

In return for Rugby Cup press credentials, the rugby board is limiting the number of game photos that can be published in online news sites during competition. It is also demanding that headlines not be superimposed over photographs, a rule designed to protect corporate sponsors like Heineken and Toshiba.

"We're not being draconian," said Greg Thomas, head of communications for the International Rugby Board, which is based in Dublin. "It's just in some instances we need to protect ourselves if people step over the mark. This is just in case we feel an organization is doing something untoward, such as blatantly putting something over the background where it obscures obviously our sponsors, who are keen to get as much exposure as they can."

The Rugby Cup's executives argue that they are "unashamedly" guarding potential revenue during an expansion period for the sport. But critics have argued that sports institutions are also seizing more power to manage and burnish their images.

"There's a natural trend among sports organizations to expand their territory," said Jens Sejer Andersen, director of Play the Game, a nonprofit sports ethics research group in Denmark. "This is normal for any business that tries to expand its control of the market. But it goes to the core of the functioning of the independent media in our society. The danger is that no real discussion about events on and off the sports field can take place, reducing us to millions of passive sports-consuming robots."

Since the late 1990s, tensions about online publication of game photos has often surfaced in connection with the media credentials issued by the sports authorities. These authorities wield the power to grant journalists access to photograph games, provided the journalists abide by rules that are constantly evolving with the development of online news sites.

In the United States in 1997, for instance, the National Football League threatened to revoke the press credentials for The Florida Times-Union if the paper failed to sign waiver forms barring it from posting photographs of Jacksonville Jaguar games on its Web site. The Times-Union countered by warning that it would not cover the Jaguars, and the dispute sputtered out.

This form of saber rattling has continued since then, from big game to big game, with news organizations and sports institutions loath to press the issue in court and instead relying on alternative forms of leverage.

In 2004, for example, British newspapers countered efforts by the dominant English Premier soccer league to seek more control over the online use of sports photos by shunning game shots that showed the logos of sponsors like Coca-Cola and Barclays.

Last year, the World Association of Newspapers also successfully challenged FIFA, the international soccer association, by approaching top sponsors to complain about proposed restrictions on the use of game photos - a tactic that is now an option in its current dispute with rugby officials.

"Sports organizations are taking a much harder view on limiting access for commercial gain, and it's not isolated," said Larry Kilman, a spokesman for the newspaper association, an industry group with 18,000 members, based in Paris. "They look at each other to see what each is doing.

"We don't have any objection to their licensing agreements and the exclusive rights that they provide to broadcasters." he continued. "But we think that these restrictions are not needed and they're being overly cautious."

At stake for big-league sports organizers is the potential revenue they could reap through new forms of media. The International Rugby Board, for instance, chose to limit the online publication of still photographs to five for each half of the game - in part because it wanted to protect the exclusivity of its own subscription-based "match tracker," which features game commentary online along with a running assortment of still photographs.
For similar reasons, the authorities of the Pan American Games wanted to protect the exclusivity of their events by barring athletes from blogging or "vlogging" with audio or video content. Eloyza Guardia, a spokeswoman for the organizers, said they were simply following the lead of the International Olympic Committee.

A similar ban was imposed during the Winter Olympics in Turin in 2006. Emmanuelle Moreau, a spokeswoman for the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne, Switzerland, said the organization was still gathering opinions about a new policy that will be drawn up in time for the Summer Olympics in Beijing next year.

Typically, there is a divide on this issue between dominant sports organizations and lesser-known competitions that are trying to build audiences. The America's Cup sailing match, which starts April 16 in Valencia, Spain, attracts less television coverage than some international events and is placing no restrictions on blogging and is allowing liberal use of still photos; a maximum of three pictures per minute can appear online. The Volvo Ocean Race last year actually required its sailors to blog.

Jeff Bukantz, captain of the U.S. fencing team, which is bound for the Pan American Games, was unaware until recently that competition blogging was banned.

In 2004, he published a running personal commentary when he was captain of the U.S. Olympic fencing team, which won a gold medal. He describes athlete blogging in general as a cathartic outlet for pressured competitors to release pent-up thoughts and feelings.

"Our athletes will abide by whatever the local rules are," he said, but he called the blogging ban "shocking."

"It's certainly an egregious form of censorship," he said.