Last month while in Paris, I took a short video clip of an Olympic women's field hockey match and posted it on Facebook. It was less than a minute long and showed the Netherlands team on the attack against Great Britain.
The idea was to share this unique experience with family and friends. Watching an Olympic event live, particularly a sport with which I was only passingly familiar, was thrilling.
I wanted others to be able to enjoy it, too, if only vicariously.
No big deal. People post video from live sporting events all the time.
Yet within a day or two, I received a notice from Facebook that my clip "violated community standards" and was an infringement of copyright owned by the International Olympic Committee. I filed a formal appeal and requested an explanation as to why my short personal clip, shot on my iPhone, was in any way violating the IOC's copyright.
I never received a response.
I tagged Meta (Facebook's parent company), Facebook itself, and the IOC on Twitter to see if they could explain the situation to me there.
Again, no response.
Being banned from Facebook for four days isn't the end of the world, I realize. I rely on FB to drive most of my blog traffic, but it's not like I'm making a living from this blog anyway.
It was more the principle of the thing.
Nowhere on our tickets or in our official Olympic emails did I find a ban on videography or photography. The ban notice from Facebook even admitted it was discovered "using our technology" (i.e., a bot) and that no human had actually reviewed the video.
The whole thing seemed patently unfair.
Yet I might argue it was also necessary.
As both a content creator and a content consumer, as well as a corporate communicator and former newspaper journalist, believe me when I say I get the need for tight enforcement of copyright law. People who write, photograph, shoot video and otherwise provide the stuff that makes the Internet interesting need to have their content protected if we expect them to continue doing what they do.
It's impossible to police copyright over the entire vast universe of the Internet manually, so bots are needed. There aren't enough people available to do it the old-fashioned way.
I'm guessing the vast majority of what the bots find really is copyright violation, which is good.
But as my own experience suggests, they also get it wrong sometimes. Or at least, they got it wrong in my situation as far as I know. I may simply not have seen a sign prohibiting the taking of video when we entered Stade Yves-du-Manoir for the field hockey match.
This might just be a case of having to break some eggs if you're going to make an omelet. Some people will be unjustly banned, and that may be unavoidable. On balance, automated copyright enforcement is probably effective the vast majority of the time.
So I'm torn.
In the end, I don't believe I did anything wrong. And a four-day ban from being allowed to post, comment or even "like" someone's Facebook content is absolutely no big deal.
There's no foolproof way to protect copyright online, or even to stop the spread of blatantly untrue political and social content. So if a relatively small percentage of us get the shaft, that's probably a fair tradeoff.
That doesn't mean I'm not still annoyed by the whole thing, though.
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