The dilemma of the unjust Facebook ban

A screen shot from my apparently illegal Olympic field hockey video

Last month while in Paris, I took a short video clip of an Olympic women's field hockey match and posted it on Facebook. It was less than a minute long and showed the Netherlands team on the attack against Great Britain.

The idea was to share this unique experience with family and friends. Watching an Olympic event live, particularly a sport with which I was only passingly familiar, was thrilling.

I wanted others to be able to enjoy it, too, if only vicariously.

No big deal. People post video from live sporting events all the time.

Yet within a day or two, I received a notice from Facebook that my clip "violated community standards" and was an infringement of copyright owned by the International Olympic Committee. I filed a formal appeal and requested an explanation as to why my short personal clip, shot on my iPhone, was in any way violating the IOC's copyright.

I never received a response.

I tagged Meta (Facebook's parent company), Facebook itself, and the IOC on Twitter to see if they could explain the situation to me there.

Again, no response.

Being banned from Facebook for four days isn't the end of the world, I realize. I rely on FB to drive most of my blog traffic, but it's not like I'm making a living from this blog anyway.

It was more the principle of the thing.

Nowhere on our tickets or in our official Olympic emails did I find a ban on videography or photography. The ban notice from Facebook even admitted it was discovered "using our technology" (i.e., a bot) and that no human had actually reviewed the video.

The whole thing seemed patently unfair.

Yet I might argue it was also necessary.

As both a content creator and a content consumer, as well as a corporate communicator and former newspaper journalist, believe me when I say I get the need for tight enforcement of copyright law. People who write, photograph, shoot video and otherwise provide the stuff that makes the Internet interesting need to have their content protected if we expect them to continue doing what they do.

It's impossible to police copyright over the entire vast universe of the Internet manually, so bots are needed. There aren't enough people available to do it the old-fashioned way.

I'm guessing the vast majority of what the bots find really is copyright violation, which is good.

But as my own experience suggests, they also get it wrong sometimes. Or at least, they got it wrong in my situation as far as I know. I may simply not have seen a sign prohibiting the taking of video when we entered Stade Yves-du-Manoir for the field hockey match.

This might just be a case of having to break some eggs if you're going to make an omelet. Some people will be unjustly banned, and that may be unavoidable. On balance, automated copyright enforcement is probably effective the vast majority of the time.

So I'm torn.

In the end, I don't believe I did anything wrong. And a four-day ban from being allowed to post, comment or even "like" someone's Facebook content is absolutely no big deal.

There's no foolproof way to protect copyright online, or even to stop the spread of blatantly untrue political and social content. So if a relatively small percentage of us get the shaft, that's probably a fair tradeoff.

That doesn't mean I'm not still annoyed by the whole thing, though.

One thing I learned at the Olympics: We should let the Dutch run the world

Last week I was in Paris with my wife Terry, my daughter Elissa, and Elissa's boyfriend Mark. We were there for the Olympics, and other than coming home with a case of Covid to a house without electricity thanks to a powerful storm a few days earlier, it was incredible.

We didn't get to any of the truly high-profile events. Or at least I didn't. I was already coming a day later than Terry, Elissa and Mark, but a delayed connecting flight forced me to miss my plane to Paris and to arrive on Sunday morning, rather than Saturday afternoon as planned.

The result was that my three travel companions got to watch the U.S. women's soccer team defeat Japan 1-0 on Saturday while I was still hanging around the airport in Atlanta.

Even though I wasn't there, my favorite thing about that match was that a number of people apparently asked to take pictures with my family, especially Elissa and Mark, who were dressed like this:

Elissa is on the left and Mark on the right, The woman in the middle was one their adoring fans at the U.S.-Japan women's soccer match who asked to take photos with them.

I just loved that. Elissa says cowboy hats, in particular, are a novelty for Europeans, who quite naturally don't get to see them very often.

Anyway, I didn't make women's soccer, but I did get to attend women's field hockey and a session of track and field. For all the hassle it was to get to the some of the venues – and make no mistake, the endless subway rides and countless steps we took to reach these sites were a hassle by any definition – the atmosphere, energy and fan camaraderie at Olympic events almost can't be described.

As Ferris Bueller would say, I highly recommend it.

Among the people we encountered during our week in Paris, my favorite were the fans from the Netherlands. They come from a relatively small country, but when their nation is represented on the international athletic stage, they show up loudly and proudly in large numbers.

I quickly realized that all of us who don't happen to come from the Netherlands/Holland have quite a bit to learn from the Dutch. To the point that I think we would be better off if we formed some sort of world government and allowed the Netherlanders to oversee it.

Three reasons why:

(1) They're smart: Mark and I were standing in line between field hockey matches outside Stade Yves-du-Manoir waiting to refill our water bottles. The line was long and the sun was hot. At one point the two Dutch guys in front of us persuaded almost everyone to move the line about 10 feet to the left so we could all be in the shade. It was a simple idea, but it hadn't occurred to anyone else. They convinced several people with whom they do not share a common language the mutual benefit of shifting the line over. That takes impressive communication skills. And brains.

(2) They're very comfortably bilingual: We talked briefly with the two smart Dutch men, and their wonderful grasp of English reminded me how effortlessly people in that part of Europe switch among languages. I worked with many people at Goodyear who were fluent in at least three languages and it always impressed me. In my experience, people who can speak in multiple tongues are generally people worth listening to.

(3) They proudly wear orange in mass numbers: While the flag of the Netherlands is red, white and blue, the national color is orange. Their fans deck themselves out in orange shirts, orange pants, orange hats, orange socks, etc. When we saw them take on Great Britain in field hockey, the stands were a sea of orange and orange variants. The only people not wearing orange were the relatively reserved British fans and us. Everyone else was cheering in unison for a Netherlands team that would go on to win the gold medal in the event. Want results? Get everyone on the same page, no matter their role in the process. The Dutch have known that for years.

The sleeping (or lack of sleeping) is my least favorite part about flying to other parts of the world

I've had both good and bad experiences flying to Europe.

The worst was probably the time I spent 8+ hours from Chicago to Frankfurt in a middle seat next to a guy with a very active cold who was apparently gunning for the Guinness record for World's Loudest Cough. I somehow managed to avoid getting sick, but needless to say, I didn't get much sleep on that flight.

The best was undoubtedly the time I went from Newark to Brussels in business class. I slept like a baby in my little pod with the lie-flat seat and the comfy pillow and blankets. The only trouble was, they woke us up for landing way before I was ready to leave Dreamland. It was the one time I could have done with a 10-hour flight.

I fondly remember the first time I flew to Europe in 1999 because it was a daytime run from Toronto to London. We left early in the morning and got to the UK that evening. I may have dozed a bit, but the important thing was that, unlike overnight flights, I didn't feel I had to sleep.

It's that pressure to get significant shuteye that makes me dislike late-night flights of the sort I'll be taking this evening. Tonight I'm scheduled to fly from Cleveland to Atlanta, then from Atlanta to Paris to spend a week in the French capital to watch Les Olympiques.

(That's the Olympics, for those who don't know a baguette from a hole in the ground.)

The overseas flight from Atlanta doesn't take off until 11:30pm Eastern, which is 5:30am tomorrow in Paris. Basically I'll be trying to sleep on the plane at a point when it's already morning at my destination, thus ensuring that my internal clock will never, ever adjust to the local time zone while I'm there.

Now on one hand, hey, I get to go to the Olympics in Paris. I should quit my whining.

On the other hand, why can't I find flights that arrive in Europe the same day? Why do these seem so scarce anymore?

First-world problems, I'm aware, but they're the only problems I know.

Allons-y!

I should be more motivated to brush up on my French before we head to the Olympics

Nice job with a "stereotypical French guy" photo, AI Blog Post Image Generator!

One of my favorite things about traveling to French-speaking areas of the world is getting the chance to put my 14 years of French language education to use.

As I've chronicled here before, I grew up in a school district where everybody took French in 1st through 6th grades. I continued taking it throughout middle and high schools, and nearly pulled off a minor in the subject with three years of additional French classes at John Carroll University.

The result has been that, on my eight or nine combined trips to Montreal and Paris over the years, I've been able to hold my own when it came to ordering in a restaurant, asking directions, getting answers to simple questions on the street, etc.

Actually, I've held my own in Paris much more than in Montreal. The Quebecois accent is such that my Parisian French education, combined with my Northeast Ohio inflection, renders me as unintelligible to some Montrealers as they are to me.

The point is, I know some French. Having not used it much, I read it much better than I speak it.

My daughter Elissa had almost as much French education as me and has taken actual French classes in recent years as an adult. She and I (along with Terry and Elissa's boyfriend Mark) are scheduled to arrive in Paris 16 weeks from today to take in some Summer Olympics events and generally see the sites as we're able.

I figure that, with our collective French proficiency and past experience in Paris, we should navigate just fine in the City of Light.

But I'm not going out of my way to review French vocabulary and syntax before we jet off to the continent. I should, but I'm not.

There are any number of excuses I can give for this, but the reality is that I'm simply a lazy American.

Language-wise (and many other wises), we are among the most spoiled people on earth. There are few places we can go where people won't either willingly speak English to us, or else roll their eyes and switch to English because we're obviously not going to make the effort to learn their language.

This is even worse because I mostly know their language. It wouldn't take much for me to get back into Francophone shape, but especially with a multi-cultural event like the Olympics, it will be easy to get around using only English.

I'm hoping to get more motivated between now and early August, but don't bet on it.

C'est la vie.

We're going to the Paris Olympics next year and I'm pretty sure we'll be sleeping in the street

Some months ago, my daughter Elissa called and asked, "Hey, do you want to go to the Olympics?"

My response was a somewhat bemused, "What?"

She repeated the question.

"The answer to that is always 'yes,'" I replied, "but tell me more."

It turned out Elissa had won a lottery giving her the right to purchase tickets for up to three events at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Seeing the Summer Olympics in person has long been a bucket list item of mine, so I didn't need to be asked twice.

When the day came to buy tickets online, Elissa was equipped with a list of our preferred events and the amount we were willing to pay. As you might imagine, some sports are more popular than others, to the point that you're much more likely to score front-row seats to, say, handball than you are for women's gymnastics.

Elissa spent a frantic 15 minutes typing and scrolling, coming away with four tickets each to a women's quarterfinal field hockey match, a women's quarterfinal soccer match, and the one thing on which I had my heart set, a full day of track and field.

In the event, gaining admission to these events was the easy part. And I'm sure we'll have no problems booking a suitable flight to take Elissa, Terry, Mark and me to France next summer.

The issue lies with our accommodations. We immediately tried booking Airbnb and Vrbo houses, only to be denied each time without explanation.

No explanation was needed, though. The owners of these rental properties are (wisely) going to jack up the prices by a factor of 3x or more, and they were all waiting for the market to sort itself out before fixing their fees and accepting reservations.

We also tried several hotels, but in most cases, you couldn't book anything outside of a 365-day (and in some cases a 400-day) window preceding your arrival.

Now we're getting to the point of being one year out, and as I type this, we're still looking for places to lay our heads for the week we plan to be in Paris. The cheapest VRBOs are $3,600 for six nights, which actually isn't bad but also doesn't provide the type of bed situation we need.

We may ultimately end up staying somewhere outside of Paris and taking a train into the city each day, which would be OK.

But part of me still wonders how comfortable a sleeping bag under the Arc de Triomphe would be on a warm French summer night.

(NOTE: A few days ago, long after this post was already written, we were able to procure a nice Airbnb in Paris. That's a relief, of course, but I hope you don't mind me having strung you along there for a couple of minutes.)