United States based tech company CityPure LLC launched a Paris 2024 Olympics themed website Saturday that will be followed by a companion smartphone app next week. They are being positioned as “full scope competitors” to the official properties offered by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for the Games set to open Friday. Included in the mobile app will be functionality for spectators to livestream Olympic events from venues, and both platforms will broadcast those streams and offer news and information that may be contrary to the official Olympic conversation.
The release is certain to draw the attention of the IOC just one week ahead of the opening of the Olympic Games and coinciding with the high level Executive Board meeting in Paris Saturday. The IOC, highly protective of its intellectual property rights and the numerous sponsorship agreements in place, could be forced into action.
Anticipating IOC pushback, the CityPure legal team says it will file a declaratory judgment Federal lawsuit in Houston, Texas on Monday. That legal action is designed to ward off any potential IOC litigation by clarifying that the launch of the website and apps are within the scope of agreements made among CityPure, the IOC and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) in internet domain name lawsuits settled in 2009 and 2017, the company claims. Both the IOC and USOPC will be named defendants.
CityPure Founder and President Stephen Frayne Jr. says his company has retained a multifaceted legal team including intellectual property litigators in the United States and France as well as contract attorneys, and has a Federal judge in Texas ready to hear the case. He is ready to move forward in the name of free speech and aims to use the apps to shine an unbiased spotlight on the major corporations that support the Olympic Movement.
Now hosted at Paris2024.com and available for Android and iPhone devices starting July 26th just hours ahead of the opening ceremony, the CityPure apps will support 12 languages and offer users Games schedules and competition data and include “information regarding their favorite nations and athletes during the Games along with transparent information about some of the TOP sponsors the IOC engages with,” Frayne told GamesBids.com.
“Our goal … is to give Olympic fans an alternative source of public information.”
The IOC and the Olympic organizing committee publish the official Games website at Paris2024.org and offer branded apps.
Though CityPure intends to profit from its apps, the Paris2024.com website content will be offered ad free and at no cost to users as a “public service.”
The in-venue livestreaming through the company’s new SportzStream product will allow users to broadcast events directly from their devices to other app and website users around the globe. A geofence will be utilized to verify that the user is at the competition venue and eligible streams will be limited to 20 minute segments unless a USD $15 upgrade is purchased that will be valid for the Games’ duration.
Other major platforms such as Facebook and YouTube have been known to use the same geofence technology to quickly shut down livestreams of Olympic competitions in order to distance themselves from copyright infringement liability.
To protect television and internet broadcast rightsholders who support the Olympics with billion dollar agreements, the IOC forbids social media streaming from events and has technological barriers in place to prevent it. In the purchase agreement, ticket holders are warned not to “transmit or distribute (or otherwise provide to a third party) any moving images and/or sounds taken or recorded within the Venue over television, radio, the internet (including on social media and by livestreaming).”
CityPure’s apps will ignore those restrictions and allow streamers to broadcast freely, presumably at their own risk.
A mission statement from the organization explains “CityPure strives to enact substantiate change to improve the lives of people who are underprivileged, and promote accountability and responsibility of multinational corporations.”
Frayne told GamesBids.com “It´s imperative that we bring attention to the plight of underprivileged, exploited laborers and do our part to alleviate poverty and improve corporate accountability.”
“Having this Paris2024.com website gives us a forum for awareness to address these concerns while exposing the hypocrisy of Olympic sponsors in front of a global audience.”
Frayne is well known to the IOC and the USOPC for internet domain name disputes dating back to 2008. For more than two decades Frayne has registered “thousands” of city/year combination domain names (such as Paris2024.com) representing possible future Olympic host cities and upcoming Games years which occur quadrennially.
He has now set up a virtual domain name bingo card with over 120 combinations involving several cities until 2040, banking on the possibility that the IOC elects one of his combinations and continues with the tradition of city/year branding. And they have.
Along with Paris2024.com, CityPure has rights to LA2028.com and plans to deliver apps for that planned edition of the Olympics as well. Both domains were registered several years before the IOC elected those cities to host the Games, a fact Frayne has leveraged to show that the IOC had no prior rights to their use.
In 2008 the then United States Olympic Committee (USOC) filed an action against Frayne with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) claiming the domain Chicago2016.com that published “balanced information” was being used in “bad faith” while that U.S. city was bidding to host the Games. The action included the Tokyo2016.com domain – Chicago’s rival bid – but Frayne’s lawyers succeeded in getting the case moved to a domestic U.S. court and it was later settled after both bids failed and the 2016 Games went instead to Rio de Janeiro.
Frayne was permitted to retain the domains for his own use.
When in 2013 Tokyo was elected to host the 2020 edition, Frayne dabbed his bingo card once again on the Tokyo2020.com domain – and IOC officials took notice as the registration risked impacting an actual planned Games and not just a bid. In 2017 the IOC and the USOC joined in taking action against Frayne and his company to recover all of his registered city name and year domain combinations and prevent the defendants from registering and using “confusingly similar” branding in the future.
IOC Legal Action To Secure 2024 Olympic Bid Internet Domain Names Seen As Affront To Free Speech
At the time, Frayne insisted that fundamental free speech was his motivation for registering the domains and told GamesBids.com “that investment in a healthy, informed democracy requires either sponsorship or operating revenue or both.”
The IOC lawyers claimed that CityPure’s plans to earn revenue from the domains breached the terms of the Chicago2016.com settlement.
In 2017, CityPure and the IOC settled the matter with an undisclosed agreement that Frayne considers a win. None of the domains were transferred to the IOC and CityPure eventually let the registration of Tokyo2020.com expire.
For Paris 2024, Frayne has assembled a multinational team of more than 20 people including app developers, PR and business professionals and lawyers. Hosting and streaming services will be facilitated through independent third parties and Frayne said the IOC will have no technological or legal means to shut down his apps.
The IOC has a long history of legal action against so-called cybersquatters or those who use Olympic related domain names to cash in on the well-established goodwill of the Olympic Movement. In 2000 the IOC filed an in rem lawsuit where it claims to have “successfully brought suit to cancel or recover nearly 1,800 internet domain names” that contained Olympic branding. Other times it has brought injunctions against individual domain name registrants. But the IOC and USOPC have yet to successfully wrest a single domain from CityPure, despite multiple attempts.
This latest move by CityPure will be a last minute ambush on the IOC as it is just days from celebrating the first post-pandemic Olympics with venues full of spectators and an historic opening ceremony along the Seine River. The publisher said new content will be added to the website in the next week ahead of the Games.
GamesBids.com will be reporting from Paris starting next Tuesday (July 23) covering the 142nd IOC Session and the possible election of French Alps 2030 and Salt Lake City 2034 Olympic Winter Games bids.
Editor’s Note: Since publication, an IOC spokesperson has responded to a request for comment indicating “the appropriate teams are following up.”
We’ll continue to follow this story as it develops.
