London 2012 Olympics Win Gold Medal For Cluelessness By Banning Video And Photo Uploads To Social Media During Games

As Techdirt has reported, the London 2012 Olympics bring with them a range of "special" measures guaranteed to make London a place for lovers of freedom to avoid this summer. But it seems that the organizers wish to ensure that anyone attending will also have a rather miserable time: 

On Techdirt.

London 2012 Olympics Go For Gold in the Extreme 'Ambush Marketing' Law Event: 'Guilty Until Proven Innocent' – And No Streaking Allowed

The Olympic Games are not just about sporting success, but also legal excess – in particular, taking laws to extremes in order to "protect" sponsors, who are routinely elevated to the level of Greek gods during the games, with similarly superhuman rights over lesser beings like you and me.

Techdirt has already written about the UK police getting special powers to enter homes during the 2012 games, as well as free speech being curtailed. Now there are plans to suspend the presumption of innocence too: 

On Techdirt.

2012 Olympics Win Gold Medal for Liberticide

I always hated the Olympics as a vulgar, corrupt and expensive display of corrosive, narrow-minded nationalism. Later, I came to realise that it is also a splendid example of all that is wrong with intellectual monopolies, as the IOC tries to claims "rights" over everyday word combinations. Now I realise that it links up neatly with all kinds of issues relating to corporate greed and the police state:

Police will have powers to enter private homes and seize posters, and will be able to stop people carrying non-sponsor items to sporting events.

"I think there will be lots of people doing things completely innocently who are going to be caught by this, and some people will be prosecuted, while others will be so angry about it that they will start complaining about civil liberties issues," Chadwick said.

"I think what it will potentially do is to prompt a debate about the commercial nature of the Games. Do big sponsors have too much influence over the Games?"

Surely not.

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Not a Sustainable Position

Somebody clearly doesn't understand open source:

Despite a mission to make the games as financially and environmentally sustainable as possible, the organisers of London 2012 have ruled out any significant use of open source software.

Open source is the *only* sustainable option for software, because it can be re-used - one of the great advantages of free software. So given that open source should be the only option, why aren't the organisers using it?

“My primary driver here is to deliver the Olympics and that means using proven applications software and by and large that application software does not run on open standards – there are some exceptions to that we are running a little bit of Linux but by and large it is Windows orientated,” he said.

What planet is this man living on? "Proven software...does not run on open standards"? What, like Apache, or Sendmail or BIND or JBoss or MySQL? Well, it's clear which Olympics event *he* would come first in: clueless CIO twit of the year.

Gawd Bless Whingeing Brits

Britons are still not convinced the 2012 London Olympic Games will be a success, according to a new survey.

Only 15% of the 2,006 people who were quizzed online think the Games will be good for the United Kingdom's international reputation.

That's the kind of attitude we want to see, none of this pathetically up-beat 加油 nonsense....

Behold! The New Anti-Open Access FUD

As I've noted before, I'm something of a connoisseur of FUD, and I really like coming across new examples. Here's one, directed at the burgeoning open access movement, which wants to make publicly-paid for scientific papers freely available (and others, too):

'The idea of public access to research information is a little bit specious,' added Robert Parker, managing director of RSC publishing. 'The UK government will be funding the London Olympics in 2012, but that doesn't mean that everybody can have free tickets - there is a big difference between funding something and having it be freely available.'

Nice sleight of hand there, Robbie. Except that the UK government is funding the Olympics in the (probably mistaken) belief that everyone will benefit from the knock-on effects on the economy, world prestige, blah-blah-blah: so there *is* an expectation of getting something in return for the public funds. And of course no one expects free seats - because there is a finite number of them - whereas the larger benefits, if they materialise, can be shared.

Open access is different because taxpayers can benefit from it directly. Most importantly, though, open access is digital in nature, and therefore can be copied and distributed for effectively zero cost - it is non-scarce and non-rivalrous. There is no way of giving away seats at the Olympics for zero cost, because they are scarce, rivalrous resources. The economics are completely different, as any managing director should understand. (Via Peter Murray-Rust.)