Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

How to See a Handball: Watch France Cheat Its Way Into the World Cup

In the U.S., this is no big deal, but in much of the world this is now the sports equivalent of the Zapruder film: French soccer star Thierry Henry cheating, via a handball, and propelling his team past Ireland and into next year’s World Cup.

The Web is full of chatter about yesterday’s game, but video is hard to come by. Again, this appears to be a case of Google’s (GOOG) YouTube flexing its ContentID system on behalf of copyright owners, in this case the European sports marketing company Sportfive.

This is a theoretical victory for content creators, who want to be able to control how and where their stuff appears on the Web. But since there doesn’t seem to be an approved video, it’s not really a solution. If it’s a story that’s attracting most of the world’s attention, someone’s going to find it, somewhere.

For instance, a bit of searching did yield these two, at least for now: A high-quality YouTube version of what appears to be a French broadcast, via the Los Angeles Times, and what appears to be a German highlight reel, via DailyMotion and FootyTube, which consistently has great soccer highlights, legal or not (thanks to Zen Web Solutions for the reminder).

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus