Entertainment lawyer Gordon Firemark and Tamera Bennett recently did a podcast episode addressing some intellectual property and copyright issues which had been in the news. One of the problems they covered was the controversy over music licensing rights during Olympic skating and other routines.

This isn’t a new issue in 2024 I made a post about the same problem cropping up during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. The problem is that the skaters and others hadn’t secured the correct level of rights. What is okay during an untelevised finals competition isn’t sufficient for a routine broadcast internationally.

Firemark and Bennett suggest that surely NBC secured the rights, but in an article I cited in my 2024 post, skaters were told NBC would likely mute the music during their routine broadcast via their streaming platform. It wasn’t muted and NBC and the skaters were named in a lawsuit.

Firemark notes that up until 2014, the Olympics required public domain music but in an attempt to appeal to a younger audience, they began to encourage the use of pop music. Unfortunately, they apparently left it to the athletes to secure all the appropriate rights. Listening to Firemark and Bennett, they don’t seem to be 100% certain about all the categories that would need to be covered (public performance for broadcast, public performance in the venue, arrangement license if you are using a medley, synchronization license, grand rights were all mentioned), so it isn’t surprising the athletes didn’t get it right.

Near the end of the segment, they suggest that in the future athletes may choose to use AI generated music. Bennett suggests there might still be a problem if the music too closely resembles the pieces the AI was trained on.