It wasn't copyright that ruined the Olympics. Copyright was just one tool that was used in service of ruining them. The real ruiner is advertising. When a busi

It wasn't copyright that ruined the Olympics. Copyright was just one tool that was used in service of ruining them. The real ruiner is advertising. When a business makes most, or all, of its money from advertising and sponsorships that business necessarily becomes beholden to the desires of those sponsors. Companies that take advertising very rarely, if ever, say no to their sponsors, so sponsors have gotten into the habit of making whatever ludicrous and extreme demands they can come up with, because they know the answer will be yes. This is how you get a situation where Visa is the only credit card accepted on the Olympic grounds. In the land of journalism, in magazines and newspapers, it is an ethics violation to have the advertisers influence the content. Even then, it still happens all the time, as in video game journalism. The Olympics is not a journalistic institution. It can do whatever its advertisers ask. Since each of the advertisers is paying such an enormous amount of money, without which the Olympics would not exist, the sponsors effectively own the Olympics. Even if the organizing committees would rather not do as the sponsors say, they are afraid to say no. The sponsors know that even though their demands are extreme, it mostly makes the Olympics look bad, not themselves. I see this same thing happening in many ad-supported companies. The advertisers have more decision making power than the CEO. It's a great deal. You get to effectively own a company without actually taking any of the risks, or doing any of the work, associated with actually owning the company. And the cost of sponsorship is a lot less than the cost of buying stock.