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Comment by casca | Hacker News Reader

While they'll probably go a little too far, this is a good thing. The Olympics are an incredibly expensive event to put on that many people love and someone needs to pay for it. There are a limited number of people who can visit the games due to cost and seating restrictions, so TV advertising is required. If this kind of thing doesn't happen, the value and therefor the price of the sponsorship drops, leading to a worse Olympics for all.

It doesn't matter if you don't like sport or the IOC or the fact that London won the Olympics. This is the situation and it would be imprudent to act any other way.

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> The Olympics are an incredibly expensive event to put on that many people love and someone needs to pay for it.

I am continually fascinated by the idea, often proposed in other contexts than this one, that we must spend money as an axiom and then figure out how to fund it as a corollary.

I don't really disagree with your dichotomy: we can either have expensive events or sane intellectual property law, but not both. I'm merely wondering at which meeting we picked one over the other, and what happened to my invitation :-)

I do disagree with the dichotomy; I doubt firms would stop paying to be official sponsors just because others were allowed to use the terms sensibly (i.e. not implying that they were affliated with the Games).

Also, we already have plenty of trademark protections. I don't see why they're not sufficient for the Olympics, given that they seem to work fine for everything else.

Because the IOC demanded that their minions be designated a privileged class. The parliament of the day fell over themselves to give in to those demands.

They had to! The games might have gone to Paris. Wouldn't that have been terrible?

I think the argument goes that they're such a high-profile target for trademark infringement that it would be impossible for them to police and enforce it to a sufficient degree without extra state protection.

You've got a pretty big leap there between "TV advertising is required" and "we need to ban everyone from saying the words London 2012 and cover up logos across the city".

I'm pretty sure that selling TV advertising during sporting events is possible even without new draconian IP laws being passed.

I believe a lot of British people have the right to complain because their taxpayers dollars are going towards this. Far more than the sponsorship agreement potential that demanded restriction of speech.

Essentially it's a net-negative economic policy. I'm not sure why it's beneficial for any country to host it when history has shown that it had caused violation of liberties, losses, environmental issues, no tourism increase, etc.

The little shit who lands the deal gets to say "I brought the Olympics to London". That's why. Whether that's actually a good thing is not only immaterial, it's never even given a moment's thought.

Britain been doing a good job shitting on its liberties already, though. I'm not sure the Olympic Games are going to make such a big difference. So, I suppose that's good?

Or the irony that the bunch of thieving lying scum that are now claiming the credit are the bunch of thieving lying scum that opposed it at the time - and the bunch of thieving lying scum that brought it are now criticizing the bunch of thieving lying scum that are going to run it.

If there was any measurable difference between the two brands of thieving lying scum it would be funny.....

While I don't disagree with protecting their private IP, don't forget that the Olympics are funded mainly by taxpayer's money in the host country, and the games are generally considered an issue of national pride for competing countries. It's not like the IOC is ethically entitled to complete ownership of the very ancient games, and thus able to treat the whole concept and event as its exclusive private property; unless they agree to cover the full cost.

Fine, they can claim Olympics, Olympic Games, etc. Maybe even Summer Games.

But they simply have no claim to the year or the city name. It's not a little too far, it's far too far.

someone needs to pay for it

That someone is the taxpayer to the tune of GBP 10Bn - 5x the original budget.

For comparison: total sponsorship revenues are £700m http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/05032012/58/london-2012-london...

Worth noting: Whereas the host city might make some money or lose a lot of money on hosting an Olympic Games, the IOC always makes a lot of money from each Games.

Spending more money on an event does not necessarily make it better.

Plenty of other great sporting events are held without these kind of ridiculous measures.

Also: every idiot marketer in the company would be trying to pull off some annoying stunt to get marketing value from it.

It's expensive because of the all the bullshit that comes along with it. Bringing in athletes from around the world and having them compete, while expensive, could be paid for with ticket sales and perhaps a sensible amount of advertisements.

The trouble is when you force the host to spend hundreds of millions on infrastructure each time, when more than adequate facilities are already available. It's expensive because they make it so, not because it has to be.

For my part I won't be watching the Olympics and I'll go out of my way to avoid its sponsors for the duration of the Games and for some time afterward.

>The trouble is when you force the host to spend hundreds of millions on infrastructure each time //

Unfortunately it's the politicians, that want to be part of something big, spending other people's money, that choose to spend hundreds of millions. If all the countries simply said to the IOC "we're not going to spend silly money, haven't you heard there's a recession on" then it could all be done with existing infrastructure.

Meanwhile the UK could have bought everyone a Raspberry pi, a pushbike, trainers and a tracksuit and still had change to offer a free year of swimming with the £160-200 per person budget (£10bn to £12bn/ 60 million people).

Yes but if it only attracted people that were actually interested in the sport it could be held on a school playing fields on a wednesday afternoon

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