In Milan, before we inevitably get to scoring scandals and such, the first figure-skating controversy is that Spain’s Tomàs‑Llorenç Guarino Sabaté, who evidently has been charming crowds in yellow shirt and blue overalls skating to a Minions medley, was told days before the Games that his Olympic short program music “cannot be used” because of “copyright clearance issues.” After the public pressure mounted, Universal reversed course and granted permission “for this one special occasion,” salvaging the program at the eleventh hour.
Seems like a duh move. But I’ll sure take it. How though do we get to the eleventh hour?? I’m looking through a handful of articles around layered rights, murky infrastructure, and athletes, not remotely the sole beneficiaries here, asked to navigate a system they do not remotely understand.
Guarino Sabaté’s problem is not unique; it is just photogenic. Minions on Olympic ice looked good on Google News, but the same sort of structural issues show up in the story of Alysa Liu, who began choreographing to an orchestral cover of a Lady Gaga song she had found on YouTube before being told, according to Yahoo Sports, “we can’t risk it” and scrapping the idea.
That “we can’t risk it” line is doing a lot of work. There is risk in skating to an unauthorized orchestral cover: you have the underlying composition right, Gaga’s I assume, the master/use of the sound recording, and someone like me looked at it and might’ve found some distinctions between covers and derivative works, but calling it “too risky” makes it sound like some unknowable legal minefield, when in reality it is a knowable, clearable set of questions that somebody should be able to answer. The skater? No. Her coach? No. But someone!
“Too risky” sounds interchangeable with “nobody involved knows who to call, or has budgeted for the answer.”
Don’t be surprised to find me watching the Olympics and contemplating a service that manages these scary sounding “multiple buckets of rights” and offers a single platform to clear them. Lessee here…:
It’s not like that mousetrap ain’t built already. Sabaté says he thought things were ironed out back in August. That he could be told “no” days before the Olympics says less about the inherent danger of using Minions, and more about how rickety and fragmented the clearance workflow still is.
From where I sit, that is not an argument for retreating to bland, risk‑free public domain. It is an argument for building a grown‑up rights‑clearance apparatus that matches the scale of the event.
Is it so much to ask that the Olympics or NBC take the helm and not skater families? The result is predictable:
If these athletes say “that is not my job” about the legal and broadcast rights, they’re wrong obviously, but, I’m awfully sympathetic.
Using a random ten‑year‑old YouTube orchestration with no paperwork is, in fact, a bad idea. But the problem is not “Gaga is too risky”; it is that a YouTube upload is not a license. “Too risky” here reads lazily like “we do not have a path to track down the arranger, the rights, and the paperwork, and nobody has budgeted for a rights‑clearance professional to do it.” But how hard can it be. Maybe I overestimate how hard it is to rework your routine. But it SURE LOOKS like it’d be hard.
If anything, my real indictment is that the major federations, the ISU, and the Olympic organizers want skaters to dream big artistically, but they don’t provide a systematic pipeline so that some orchestral cover of a pop song on YouTube is a manageable problem. None of this has much to do with the unprotectable generalities I normally traffic in as a forensic musicologist. This isn’t me parsing melodies, harmonies, and rhythms to sort through protectable expression. But I can’t get over the idea that someone dreaming about the Olympics in a few days is suddenly changing their plans. I guess that’s obvious. I also haven’t looked into ClickNClear which sounds like it might be trying to solve for this.
I remember Scott Hamilton at the 1984 Olympics, and Bill Conti’s Rocky music. I wonder if Sylvester Stallone or United Artists signed off. The sport wants the emotional hit of pop music on the ice; who doesn’t! Everyone involved benefits, including the rightsholder. Work it out! You think at this point UA shouldn’t be grateful for that memory even if Hamilton didn’t get the license? There’s a balance here. Gotta protect your rights. Gotta make them licensable.
It’d be a shame if professional music licensing was some mystical hazard that installs timidity in a 26‑year‑old in yellow overalls whose alarm rings at 4am every day.
