In the early hours of Sunday The Sydney Morning Herald's sports editor emailed me from Brazil, asking whether a journalist would be able to stand on top of the Olympic main press centre building in Rio to film a piece to camera for a video.
The issue wasn't whether there was a staff member available to do it, or whether I wanted to commission the report. The question was whether they were allowed to do it.
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Presumably they just wanted to use the view from high up as backdrop, but I didn't bother asking because the answer was an unequivocal no.
Fairfax Media has no rights to produce Olympic video material. That means our video staff are allowed into the main press centre to shoot official press conferences, but standing on top of it is out of the question.
![The Olympics: a great public spectacle but a private party when it comes to media coverage.](/web/20160810181154im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/m/h/9/r/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqocjr.png/1470753727694.jpg)
Filming "talking heads" at press conferences – which the rules say we can't transmit until half an hour after the conference is over – is the full extent of the video we are allowed to shoot at any Olympic venue for the whole two weeks.
At least we don't have to restrict those to viewers inside Australia and we are allowed to run ads next to them if we wish.
If we want to show any actual action in the pool or on the track, on the other hand, we have to block viewers outside Australia and can't run ads. We can also only use a maximum 30 seconds or one third of the event (whichever is less), must leave three hours between publishing each video, can only publish three a day and must delete them after 24 hours.
For every second of any archive video that we run from any previous Olympics we lose a second we can use from the current ones.
These rules, known as the news access rules, apply to all non-rights holders and prescribe in minute detail what we can do. Very similar ones apply to TV networks and we all have to sign up to them if we want to send accredited journalists, photographers and video producers to cover the Games. In Australia that's effectively everyone except the Seven Network, which paid for the broadcasting rights.
Even if we embed a Seven Network video from social media in a blog or article – sending Seven the online traffic rather than benefiting ourselves – we have to lose a corresponding amount of video we can publish on our sites.
Why am I telling you this? Why should anyone care outside of a media organisation when they can just switch to whoever has the rights?
This is not a complaint. We sign up to these rules as a part of a contract that allows us to send journalists. We could decide not to not do that and just rely instead on our statutory fair dealing rights under the Copyright Act, but we believe we have the best sports writers in the country and not sending them in return for being able to run more video would be a poor deal for you, our audience.
I offer these observations, first of all, to be open about the conditions under which we gather the news, something we should probably do more often. Secondly though, these details illuminate a broader trend, which our audience and the wider public ought to be able to debate from a position of knowledge.
Sporting events are great public spectacles, offering shared experiences, prompting common conversations and keying into our sense of national and local identity. It's hardly a new observation that they have become commercialised, but what that slightly obscures is the way they have become privatised, none more so than the Olympics.
Here's one tiny example of that: a photo shared on social media by another journalist colleague at Rio who had the labels removed from his water bottles by security because they didn't carry the approved sponsorship.
![Media had labels on bottles that were not from Olympic sponsors removed.](http://web.archive.org./web/20160810181154im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/o/c/u/9/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1470714258304.png)
Media had labels on bottles that were not from Olympic sponsors removed. Photo: Brian Brownstein
More broadly, like every other non-rights holder, the International Olympic Committee's rules say we can't promote the availability of Olympic video material on our websites, can't create a separate Olympic online domain and have to credit the Australian rights holder, Seven, even if we source video from someone else entirely, say a Chinese rights holder.
Infringing any of this would be breaching the IOC's intellectual copyright, say the rules. They and Seven intend to protect their exclusivity and will "vigorously enforce" the rules.
So there you have it: the IOC doesn't just organise the Games, it is an owner of private property in the form of copyright and intends to protect its exclusivity to maximise its commercial value.
And why shouldn't it? Fairfax Media asserts its intellectual property rights as well, as do Apple, Google, Pfizer and every tech start-up. What's striking though, is the way the IOC seems resolutely determined to control every last detail, to extract every last gram of benefit from its IP.
The IOC, however, isn't just a private company. It holds in public trust what is supposed to be the world's greatest sporting event and it needs public confidence.
It is also a monopoly, and the danger for the IOC, I suggest, and for sporting bodies that are going down the same path, is that by increasingly enclosing and walling off something that draws on the emotional energy generated by shared experiences, it threatens the value of the thing it owns.
It is in any case a fundamental principle of a free media that it's never healthy for coverage of any event to be restricted to one source. Covering the Olympics as non-rights holders already feels like we have been invited to a private party whose hosts want to us to trumpet their success but won't allow us into the kitchen and are constantly counting the spoons.
The IOC needs to maintain the Games' openness and if that means relinquishing some control over access, then it should, even if that means making the TV rights less valuable and the Games run more cheaply.
Simon Morris is Fairfax Media's national video news editor.