Harry Pearson
Anyone who has spent time on the internet will know that it is not so much an information superhighway as a trivia megapub. You enter the cyberzone bright and early one morning. Your express intention is to garner hard facts about drug abuse in weightlifting. Instead you find yourself distracted by the information that the Russian super-heavyweight Andrei Chemerkin once got his 165kg frame wedged in a Finnish shower cubicle and afterwards had to be content with washing himself “a bit at a time” in a hand basin.
The next thing you know you are following a trail that meanders like a late-night conversation. You pass seamlessly from Chemerkin’s stature- related difficulties to discovering that splendidly named American golfer Cindy Figg-Currier is sponsored by Northland Cranberries and from there to the news that Muffin Spencer-Devlin numbers bungee-jumping and fox-hunting among her hobbies and appeared as a member of the Star Fleet medical team in Star Trek: Generations.
From here it is a short hop to the United States teenage skating sensation Tara Lipinski and her walk-on part in the American soap opera Veronica’s Closet. After which you would be hard-pressed to resist clicking on the latest episode in the Tonya Harding saga.
The former Olympian, infamously implicated in a conspiracy to nobble her ice-dance rival Nancy Kerrigan before the Lillehammer Games, has just served a three-day term in Clark County Jail, Washington, for disorderly conduct and malicious mischief after throwing a hubcap at her boyfriend Darren Silver.
Having found nothing of interest on the world bill-fish series and got no closer to drug abuse in weightlifting than that it is illegal to give caffeine to a racehorse, you log off to discover the house dark, the dog howling and the budgie on the floor of his cage apparently exhausted by the effort of carving the words “For God’s sake, feed me” into his cuttlefish bone.
Enjoy it while you can, I say. At the recently concluded 26th Annual Sports Lawyers Association Convention in California there was much discussion of the internet. A spokesman for the National Basketball Association claimed: “We are literally under siege by companies that are stealing our content.”
The big players in the US are apparently concerned by everything from the illegal broadcast of matches over the net to the unauthorised use of their corporate logos or club badges as they were known in more innocent times.
And why not, you may ask. After all everything these days is copyrighted. Even Church of England services now have c at the bottom followed by the names of various bishops. If God wants his percentage, then why not Ken Bates?
The answer is to be found in the way the sporting giants have behaved over the past two decades. Twenty years ago clubs and sportswear companies began to stamp out those small firms which had traditionally made cheaper replicas of the team shirt. Next they moved on to people who had the temerity to manufacture T-shirts with the players’ faces on them. Justifying the clampdown, one Premiership chair, Middlesbrough’s Steve Gibson, said he was doing it because he did not want substandard products associated with his football club. That led to a widespread rumour on Teesside that he was about to take legal action against his team’s defence.
Sadly no one seems willing to exploit the negative aspects of the new corporate sporting culture. If, for example, Manchester United is an internationally recognised brand name as we are always being told, why are BBC presenters allowed to mention it so brazenly? Just as Blue Peter folk talk of sticky-back plastic rather than Fablon, surely John Motson and co should be forced to speak euphemistically of “red-shirted ball- kickers”.
Nor does anyone know where the eagle eye of the club lawyers will fall next in their attempt to maximise revenues. My advice would be not to get a tattoo with your club’s nickname on it. It is one thing having a sweatshirt confiscated, quite another to have a buttock seized because it is infringing intellectual property rights.
The same gradual extension of power will surely happen with the internet. One day it will be claiming ownership of all useless information relating to Dennis Rodman’s choice of shirt number (he was not allowed to have his first choice “69”).
Clearly this will be a black day for freedom of speech and information. Though I cannot help feeling it will have a soothing effect on my phone bill.