The World Cup Walls Come Down

The more I see and read about the “sponsorship” behind the World Cup the more appalled I am. Ever since I heard that MasterCard (briefly) exerted a monopoly over buying tickets to the finals with a credit card, and men were told to take off their lederhosen, I realised that although it claims to, sponsorship never works to the benefit of the end user. But until I read this post from the excellent Paul Mason of BBC Newsnight, I hadn’t really linked what was happening to my supposed field of interest, the Internet and new media:

This, therefore is turning out to be the first "user-generated-content" global sports event. Much of the content is pretty scrappy but it shows the potential of the medium and how hard it's going to be for Sepp Blatter and co to defend their intellectual property (image rights for individual players, no Visacards allowed etc).

Up to now football has managed to ride the big business waves of the 1990s: paid-for content, pay-TV, below the line advertising budgets and sponsorship. How will it cope with a world where all intellectual property rights are under threat? Right now the monopoly on images is easy to defend but the monopoly on sound commentary is effectively broken because you can see numerous people in the crowd giving commentaries to their mates live.

(If you’re an England fan you’ve got to read his other post about what the manager should do, a post that has attracted, at the time of writing. more than 120 comments. Last night when I looked it had about 20.)

Going back to his intellectual property post, it’s a good point. From folk taking video of their TV to others at the game shooting the scene with their camera phone, it’s going to be impossible to ring-fence what is and isn’t seen or heard in the future. (It doesn’t mean they didn’t try.) This isn’t as clear cut as Napster file sharing, where original digital content is copied and shared. It’s about individuals mashing up what they see and heard with their own creativity. It’ll be interesting match to watch, as an increasingly sophisticated (and avaricious) marketing industry faces off against the user-generated anarchy/cooperatives of shared content.