Security Madness
Jul. 14th, 2012 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeGood thing I'm not in the UK, as my use of the five-rings logo as a userpic would allow the police to enter my home and seize my property, it appears. So would linking to the London 2012 Olympics web site in a derogatory manner, as I'm doing right now.
See this post for links to articles on how the UK has passed special custom-written laws that effectively say that free speech doesn't apply to the Olympics, the London Olympic Committee can tell you what words you can use (not just trademarks), and how London is being turned into an armed camp for the duration.
My annoyance with this is not inconsistent with my role as chairman of WSFS's Mark Protection Committee, which tries to keep people from misusing "Worldcon," "Hugo Award," etc. WSFS doesn't care if you use those terms to refer to the actual convention or the awards presented by WSFS. Indeed, we like you doing so. We like it when cities consider it worthwhile to put up banners at the airport or on the streets welcoming our convention to town. We only get annoyed when conventions that aren't the World Science Fiction Convention describe themselves as "Worldcon" or when people give out awards that are confused with the Hugo Awards. (Both of these things have happened and continue to happen.) What the London Olympic Committee is doing is radically above and beyond simple trademark protection.
With luck, they won't decide that having the military occupying the city isn't a good long-term idea. If I lived in London, I would have been long since been trying to figure out how to be out of the city — preferably out of the country — for the games this summer. My sympathies go out to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
flickgc, drplokta, and my other friends who live in around London, who it appears may be prisoners in their own homes for a month or so this year.
See this post for links to articles on how the UK has passed special custom-written laws that effectively say that free speech doesn't apply to the Olympics, the London Olympic Committee can tell you what words you can use (not just trademarks), and how London is being turned into an armed camp for the duration.
My annoyance with this is not inconsistent with my role as chairman of WSFS's Mark Protection Committee, which tries to keep people from misusing "Worldcon," "Hugo Award," etc. WSFS doesn't care if you use those terms to refer to the actual convention or the awards presented by WSFS. Indeed, we like you doing so. We like it when cities consider it worthwhile to put up banners at the airport or on the streets welcoming our convention to town. We only get annoyed when conventions that aren't the World Science Fiction Convention describe themselves as "Worldcon" or when people give out awards that are confused with the Hugo Awards. (Both of these things have happened and continue to happen.) What the London Olympic Committee is doing is radically above and beyond simple trademark protection.
With luck, they won't decide that having the military occupying the city isn't a good long-term idea. If I lived in London, I would have been long since been trying to figure out how to be out of the city — preferably out of the country — for the games this summer. My sympathies go out to
flickgc, drplokta, and my other friends who live in around London, who it appears may be prisoners in their own homes for a month or so this year.
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no subject
Date: 2012-07-14 10:16 pm (UTC)I very rarely go into London-proper, so hopefully the inevitable tube nightmare won't bother me too much, but I do drive, pretty much daily, out of London, in order to look after GB, along a road that's going to have a zili lane on it.
It's only going to cover a bit over half a mile, but it's a busy road anyway, and the fact that they've closed the side roads is already causing chaos. Even more annoyingly (for me, anyway: I'm still a little uncomfortable with central-London-agressive-driving, so I like to take a while and change lanes when it's quiet) the Games Lane that I'll need to pass is made up of about 200 yards in the right hand lane, then a 200 yard gap, then 200 yards in the left hand land. So that's two streams of traffic having to cross, on one of the busiest bits of road in the area.... (Edit: oh, and past a missile launcher. Lovely, just what you want to see on the Common!)
Maybe I'll just go the long way around, along with everyone else!
(I say "it's going to": a couple of weeks ago, they put up signs saying "overnight road works, 2/7/12". The second came and went, no work had been done but the signs remained, flashing their time-travelling warning. A few days ago, in the middle of the day, they did do some work: removing the central reservation and replacing it with fold-down poles, presumably so that the Olympic traffic can do a U-turn if the roundabout completely backs up. They still haven't actually painted the lines, though.)
(There's a-probably-unsucessful attempt at a grass-roots protest, involving gluing a blue bucket (to 'mimic' emergency lights) to the roof of the car. It would be amusing, though. And, you know, what if one happened to run out of petrol and had to pull over in an Olympic lane...?)
Plus, there's the whole
chipfrychipwe're English!thing. And then the utterly ludicrous attempts, backed up by the police, to stop shops from having Olympic-themed displays, to stop (haha) spectators from posting to social media, and so on. Utter nightmare. I can't imagine what made people think it was a good idea. I just hope that it rains the entire time: half the summer shows have been cancelled, maybe the Olympics can too?