RUK Removes Races from YouTube

[Spooner]

Guardian online

YouTube clampdown shows sport at its worst Greg Wood The Guardian, Tuesday August 12 2008 As anyone who has used it will testify, the YouTube video-sharing website could almost have been designed with horse racing in mind. The average race is a self-contained, three-minute nugget, allowing users to flit from one to the next, as they wallow in nostalgia or catch up with the sport around the world. Although it was founded less than four years ago, YouTube has already become an important resource for many racing fans. Until last week, anyway. Visit the site this morning and you will find that many of the most popular videos have been removed. If you want to relieve the Cheltenham Gold Cup victories of Desert Orchid, Kauto Star or Denman, New Approach's Derby or even Lester Piggott winning at Epsom on Never Say Die in 1954, expect instead to discover a message saying: "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation." All that racing heritage, which includes so many shared memories and moments that encapsulate why we all love the sport, has been snuffed out and the major culprit appears to be Racing UK, the satellite channel that covers around half of Britain's racecourses. Claiming that its copyright has been infringed, RUK has apparently forced YouTube to banish much of its British-based racing content, possibly never to return. In strict legal terms, RUK is within its rights. In every other sense, though, their action stinks of the kind of narrow-minded factionalism that many had hoped was slowly becoming a thing of the past. Its executives don't seem to give a stuff about the wider interests of the sport or its followers, so long as they defend their own little patch of turf. It is not as if there is any great intrinsic value in videos of past races. It is live coverage that has a real worth, since it drives betting revenue. Even as a tool for form study, its value decreases rapidly, though RUK's main rival, At The Races, has the common sense to appreciate that a free archive of all their action is a useful way to keep people interested, and therefore watching and betting. RUK, on the other hand, prefers to sell past races for 20p a time via the Racing Post's (otherwise excellent) website, another example of a greedy, short-term attitude. A similar sort of reasoning led the British Horseracing Board (as it then was) into its disastrous and humiliating attempt to charge newspapers for racecards a few years ago. The lesson of that debacle, surely, was that the information punters need to keep them interested should be as widely and freely available as possible. The internet disseminates information powerfully and efficiently, yet the knee-jerk reaction from some senior executives is to opt for censorship instead and the whole sport suffers as a result. Maybe they will finally get it 20 years after everyone else. Perhaps some of them will never get it at all. But since the British Horseracing Authority - the new administrator for the modern age - is currently in the process of overhauling its website, there may be at least a glimmer of hope on the horizon. There is very little on the BHA's site at the moment to convey the excitement of the sport, but those in charge of the redesign seem hopeful that footage of major races at least will be released for use on the new site, in the wider interests of the sport. A "Top 100" archive of some of the greatest moments in British racing history would also be a popular feature. For the moment, though, YouTube racing junkies may have to look abroad for their fix, and thankfully races like Secretariat's Belmont Stakes, Cigar's Breeder's Cup Classic and the Triple Crown series between Affirmed and Alysheba stand plenty of viewing. It is less than a week, though, since the RUK-aligned racecourses won a major victory against the bookmakers in the high court over their Turf TV offshoot. Many in the sport welcomed that success, if only because it was so rare to see the bookies on the wrong end of a decision. If the same people take such a petty-minded approach to racing videos on YouTube, however, it rather makes you wonder if the "right" side won after all.

What a load of bollocks. :spank