The British Olympic team has made an absurd threat to take legal action against people who retweet its posts.
Lawyers representing Britain’s Olympic athletes – and their sponsors – said that sharing content on social media could violate their intellectual property, and ultimately land offenders in court.
They also said that even congratulating athletes publicly or wishing them luck could be enough to rouse their ire and prompt a legal challenge.
The strong-arm tactics – designed to protect the rights of big business, which pays millions to associate itself with the Olympics – emerged in a dispute with an anti-EU group which had been cheering Britain’s success.
Leave.EU, part of the successful Brexit lobby, was sent a letter demanding that they stop cheering on British athletes – and claiming that they are proof the UK can be a successful nation outside of the EU:
The strongly-worded missive, signed by a lawyer on secondment from a City firm, listed actions that the British Olympic Association believes infringes its rights:
“Please note that usage of any Olympic-related intellectual property (including the words “Rio 2016”, “Team GB”, “Olympics” and “Olympian” and any Olympic/Team GB logos) or which do not contain these marks but suggest an association with the Olympic Games or movement (e.g. by containing images of Team GB athletes, congratulatory/good luck messaging to athletes or retweeting Olympic related content), without our consent constitute an infringement of our intellectual property rights.
These rights are reserved exclusively for our official partners who, as you will appreciate, pay significant sums to use our IP and associate themselves with the Olympic Games.”
Leave.EU said they intend to ignore the letter and continue as before.
It is questionable whether the BOA would get very far trying to enforce the right not to be retweeted in the courts.
It is certainly novel to claim that retweets require “consent”, and even weirder when Team GB actively encourages its followers to share content:
Heat Street contacted a spokesman to ask whether they seriously believed they could take legal action against people who retweet their messages, but was only given a generic statement in response.
It said: “In some cases during the Games we have to speak to organisations about the misuse of our athletes and team’s IP.
“In this case, given the scale of the use of our intellectual property without our consent, we contacted Leave.EU by email to request them to refrain from doing so. No legal action has been taken.”
A spokesman for Twitter declined to comment, but pointed Heat Street towards its copyright policies, which make no mention of retweets.
Its general terms of service don’t mention retweets explicitly.
But they do appear to address them obliquely. The terms say that using the site allows Twitter to “make your Tweets on the Twitter Services available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same“:
The move by the British authorities is part of a broader – and now familiar – move by Olympic bosses to police how people interact with the games – particularly on social media.
Earlier the International Olympic Committee banned reporters from posting GIFs of events and has also been ferocious in its efforts to remove video clips posted from unofficial accounts.