{"id":16203,"date":"2012-07-26T09:00:41","date_gmt":"2012-07-26T14:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16203"},"modified":"2012-07-26T09:00:41","modified_gmt":"2012-07-26T14:00:41","slug":"the-international-sporting-event-in-the-capital-of-the-united-kingdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/07\/26\/the-international-sporting-event-in-the-capital-of-the-united-kingdom\/","title":{"rendered":"The &#8220;international sporting event&#8221; in &#8220;the capital of the United Kingdom&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/fullcomment.nationalpost.com\/2012\/07\/26\/dahlia-lithwick-dont-talk-about-the-london-olympics-it-could-be-dangerous\/\" target=\"_blank\">Dahlia Lithwick<\/a> explains why we all need to be careful how we refer to a certain large organized sports extravaganza happening in a major city in England:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>At the London Olympics, we\u2019re seeing unprecedented restrictions on speech having anything to do with, erm, the Olympics. There are creepy new restrictions on journalists, with even nonsportswriters being told they should sign up with authorities.<\/p>\n<p>Then there\u2019s the London Olympic Games and Paralympics Games Act 2006. The law was originally aimed at preventing \u201cover-commercialization\u201d of the games, but it seems to have unloosed something of a Pandora\u2019s box of speech suppression. Provisions triggering worries for protesters include sections regulating use of the Olympic symbol \u201cin respect of advertising of any kind including in particular \u2014 (a) advertising of a non-commercial nature, and (b) announcements or notices of any kind.\u201d The law further seems to authorize a \u201cconstable or enforcement officer\u201d to \u201center land or premises\u201d where they believe such material is being produced. It also permits that such materials may be destroyed, and for the use of \u201creasonable force\u201d to do so.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>But it\u2019s not just the Olympic rings that are being protected; it\u2019s also Olympic words. As Nick Cohen recently observed, the \u201cgovernment has told the courts they may wish to take particular account of anyone using two or more words from what it calls \u2018List A.\u2019 \u201d Those words: Games, Two Thousand and Twelve, 2012, and twenty twelve. And woe betide anyone who takes a word from List A and marries it with one or more words from \u201cList B\u201d: Gold, Silver, Bronze, London, medals, sponsors, summer.<\/p>\n<p>Spectators have been warned they may not \u201cbroadcast or publish video and\/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the Internet,\u201d making uploading your video to your Facebook page a suspect activity. Be careful with your links to the official Olympic website as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dahlia Lithwick explains why we all need to be careful how we refer to a certain large organized sports extravaganza happening in a major city in England: At the London Olympics, we\u2019re seeing unprecedented restrictions on speech having anything to do with, erm, the Olympics. There are creepy new restrictions on journalists, with even nonsportswriters [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9,10,28,18],"tags":[459,186,350,314],"class_list":["post-16203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-law","category-liberty","category-media","category-sports","tag-censorship","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-london","tag-olympics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4dl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16204,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16203\/revisions\/16204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}