Rio 2007 - No Pan-American Games on the Internet

COB (Brazilian Olympic Committee) and CO-Rio (responsible for the organization of Rio 2007 Pan-American Games) announced that it will be not allowed any use of Pan-American Games images, audio or videos on the Internet.

Any website interested in covering the Games will only have access to the material within a 6 hour delay.

Athletes participating on the Games are forbidden to write anything about on their blogs.

After the You Tube incident, another China like attitude, making us to think freedom of expression is kind of out of date in Brazil.

There are about 35 million people accessing the web in Brazil, what puts the country in the 9Th position in number of accesses, ahead of Spain, Russia, Holland and Australia, among other countries. How can you ignore this audience?
Leonardo Gryner, COB Marketing Manager, says all this is being done to defend TV Networks interests. "CO-Rio wants to respect the networking contracts firmed with Brazilian TV Networks, sole distributors of the content".

Three open signal networks have the right to show the Games, Band, Globo and Record. Also three cable networks, Bandsports, ESPN-Brazil and sporTV. COB will not sell the rights to online companies.One question keeps unanswered: if COB wants so badly to defend TV networks rights to transmit the Games, why ISB (International Sports Broadcasting), a Spanish company, is responsible for the signal generation for the Games transmission?

More about this you can find here (in portuguese).