Olympic Organizers are now saying spectators are allowed to upload photos from the London games, after originally saying that it was not okay to do so.

The terms on an Olympic ticket read:
“Images, video and sound recordings of the Games taken by a Ticket Holder cannot be used for any purpose other than for private and domestic purposes and a Ticket Holder may not license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet more generally…”

And the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) internet guidelines says:

“Participants and other accredited persons can post still photographs taken within Olympic Venues for personal use. It is not permitted to commercialise, sell or otherwise distribute these photographs.”

These instructions clearly say that images cannot be broadcast, published, or otherwise distributed. That pretty much eliminates social media posts.

But The @London2012 official twitter account posted these messages a few days ago:

Which clearly say it is okay to post photos on social media.

In reality, neither of these rules matter, because IOC officials will have no way of policing every attendee for pictures posted on their social media accounts.

It would, however, be easy to find a person who is posting on a third party blog or online news publication, and that is what they are trying to prevent. People trying to make money by selling or distributing photos of Olympic athletes.

The Twitter posts are most likely a PR move from the Olympic Committee, who realize along with everyone else, trying to prevent people from posting pictures on the internet is an impossibility.

Besides, everybody knows NBC owns the Olympics and anything that happens while they are going on. No one is allowed to report the Olympic Games except NBC and their affiliates, who would like to own the media for the rest of eternity. Thank you.

(I wonder if it’s okay to post that insignia for the London games? It’s also interesting to note, any image you see of the Olympic logo always has NBC’s logo above the Olympic Rings and is always much larger.)

[Source: paidcontent]