It's really amazing how various governments around the globe fall sway to the bogus Hollywood talking points about how much copyright infringement is "harming" their business. Rather than recognizing that the situation is one where Hollywood's failure to adapt a modern business model is the biggest issue, or that (at best) this should be a civil issue, law enforcement groups have had no problem doing Hollywood's work for them. The latest? The City of London police are setting up their own "intellectual property crime unit" to deal with copyright infringement -- specifically looking to go after dowloaders. In other words, something straight out of Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema book, which happens to be our book club book this month.

The effort is being led by business secretary Vince Cable, who has sounded more reasonable on the subject in the past. But now he's setting up a private police force for Hollywood right inside the London police? And, even worse, he's pretending that this somehow encourages more creativity?

"Our creativity, our openness to and talent for innovation, is a key pillar of our return to robust growth. So it is right we work to create the environment in which creative, innovative businesses of all shapes and sizes flourish," Cable said in a speech at The Big Innovation Centre in London.

"A vital part of this is making sure the intellectual property landscape encourages and cements success and growth. The new vision for how we support businesses and consumers is central to achieving this."

Openness to talent and innovation isn't spurred along by giving one industry the ability to use the police to stop people from making mashups and being creative. It does the opposite. It creates fear among creative types and drives them further underground, rather than helping to add to creativity and culture. This seems like a big step backward for a group that had promised to take a more evidence-based approach to copyright reform.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is something of an institution in the UK, famous for his blond mop of hair and outrageous opinions. He's also been a journalist on and off for two decades, and is close to Rupert Murdoch, so it should perhaps come as no surprise that he's penned a characteristically witty defense of British newspapers. They're currently under threat of having governmental regulation imposed upon them in the wake of the UK's Leveson Inquiry, written in response to years of journalists breaking the law in search of hot stories, as Johnson acknowledges:

They have shoved their slavering snouts into the parlours of weeping widows, and by their outrageous lies they have driven the relatives of their victims to suicide. When you read Leveson in full, you are left to ponder the mystery of how people can behave like this. Are these journalists that much nastier and more cynical than the rest of the human race? Why do they seem to have got out of control? The answer is simple. The press are no nastier than anyone else; quite the reverse. On the whole, journalists are highly intelligent, amusing and frequently idealistic.

But if that is the case, how is it possible they have been shoving their slavering snouts all over the place? Johnson has a simple explanation:

for some papers the costs are becoming prohibitive. Every year, every month, they are losing ground to blogs and Twitter and Google News; every year the internet eats more destructively into the business case for old-fashioned journalism. That is at least one of the reasons why some journalists have been driven to behave so disgracefully, squawking ever louder, no matter how erroneously, in the hope of being noticed.

Yes, it's all the Internet's fault. Those poor journalists lost their otherwise robust moral compass because Big Bad Google and friends have been progressively stealing their daily bread. Of course, we've heard this narrative about Google destroying newspapers many times before. It's what publishers around the world are saying, while asking for a cut of Google's revenues. It's what Rupert Murdoch has been saying, although he still wants to be included in Google's search results.

But this whole idea is "an inverted pyramid of piffle", to use a famous phrase of Johnson's. It wasn't Google and the Internet that destroyed traditional journalism, it was the newspapers themselves by refusing to evolve as new technologies have come along that changed the relationship with the reader in significant ways. Johnson's attempt to deflect blame away from the guilty parties onto the agents of technological change is simply shabby.

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We've talked about how the Olympics are so focused on hiding any non-sponsor brand that they had officials in Beijing during the last Olympics tape over bathroom fixtures from non-sponsoring companies. And it was clear that this same sort of activity was set to continue this time around in London, including a specific law against "ambush marketing."

You may have heard the reports in London about the terrible security for the London Olympics that has left things in "absolute chaos," due to a failure to hire enough security personnel. In fact, there's talk of soldiers having to be called in to help. Given all that, it's interesting to find out that the Olympics do have a fully-staffed "brand police" force, which is heading around the city to carefully block any non-sponsor brands, and try to track down and kill off any kind of unpaid-for marketing.

Almost 300 enforcement officers will be seen across the country checking firms to ensure they are not staging "ambush marketing" or illegally associating themselves with the Games at the expense of official sponsors such as Adidas, McDonald's, Coca-Cola and BP....

Wearing purple caps and tops, the experts in trading and advertising working for the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) are heading the biggest brand protection operation staged in the UK. Under legislation specially introduced for the London Games, they have the right to enter shops and offices and bring court action with fines of up to £20,000.

So, if a terrorist attack happens to hit London over the next few weeks, at least we'll know that it wasn't sponsored by some non-paying brand.

One of the earliest proposals for mass surveillance was the Panopticon:

a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.

The design consists of a circular structure with an "inspection house" at its centre, from which the managers or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates, who are stationed around the perimeter. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, poorhouses, daycares, and madhouses, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison, and it is his prison which is most widely understood by the term.

As the rest of the fascinating Wikipedia entry on the subject explains, Bentham never managed to build his Panopticon prison, despite being given relatively large sums of public money to do so. But his idea not only lives on, it has come ever closer to realization thanks to new technologies. Boing Boing points us to this latest approach, based around smartphones and crowdsourcing:

The Metropolitan Police is hoping to use crowd-sourcing to identify people suspected of committing crimes in last year's riots in London.

Officers are to upload up to 2,800 CCTV images taken during the disorder in August on to its smartphone app.

What's particularly striking about this scheme is the scale:

"My hope is that the two-thirds of Londoners who own smartphones will download this app, and help us identify people we still need to speak to.

We need Londoners to browse through the app every week or so as new images will appear regularly. This is a fantastic way for Londoners to help us to fight crime."

In the case of the London riots, the CCTV images may be relatively unequivocal about crimes being committed; but the new scheme is already being extended beyond those exceptional events:

The app will also include a further 2,000 images of people wanted by the police for offences not connected to the riots.

That's worrying because there is no way of knowing what these people are accused of -- they might, for example, be involved in legitimate street protests against the UK government, or against multinational corporations in the UK, both of which have been subject to controversial policing in the capital. That seems a real possibility, given what Facewatch, the company behind the scheme's technology, says about its service:

An online crime reporting system for businesses to report crime providing the full evidential package required by the police

A way for businesses to deter crime by instantly sharing images of suspects between group members

In addition:

All images from reported crimes are viewed by the police who will try to identify and match suspects using the information provided.

This raises the prospect not only of deterring crime, but of deterring protests, since participating companies will be able to pass photos of protesters who are alleged to have committed criminal acts to the police, who can then add the faces to all the others on their smartphone app. Londoners can then help identify them without concerning themselves about the legitimacy of the requests, since they will just be part of the constantly-updated stream of alleged criminals. Jeremy Bentham would have been proud of such an efficient, anonymous system of control.

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We've spent plenty of time over the years highlighting the ridiculousness surrounding the Olympics and their over-aggressive enforcement of IP laws (and even getting host nations to pass special trademark laws that only apply to the Olympics in some cases). But it's really reaching positively ludicrous excesses in the UK. First up, a story of a flower shop being threatened for making a version of the Olympic logo out of tissue paper and hanging it in the shop window. You see, that kind of Olympic pride is only allowed if you've paid for the permission.

That story led us to an even crazier one. Apparently an 81-year old woman tried to sell a £1 doll at a church sale... but had it shut down because she'd dared to clothe the doll in a home made knit sweater that had a mini-Olympic logo on it.
It appears that they've turned this 81-year-old into someone who has realized the absurdity of over aggressive intellectual property protection:

The 81-year-old grandmother of six from King’s Lynn said the last thing she wanted to do was cause a crisis but attacked the rules as 'absolutely ridiculous.

'I thought that the hoops symbol was universal and I think it is disgusting that they can make rules about such little things, she said.

It seems that the Olympics would prefer that no one actually show any sort of pride or support for the Olympics unless it's an official sponsor who paid for the privilege.

As the mobile phone moves closer to the center of daily life in many parts of the world, combining phone, computer, camera, diary, music player, and much else all in one, it becomes a concentrated store of the digital DNA that defines us -- who we talk to, what we search for, who we meet, what we listen to. However convenient that may be for us as users, it's also extremely dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands.

Unfortunately, in the UK, it looks like London's police force must now join the list of "wrong hands":

The Metropolitan Police has implemented a system to extract mobile phone data from suspects held in custody.

The data includes call history, texts and contacts, and the BBC has learned that it will be retained regardless of whether any charges are brought.

If a crime has been committed, there is an argument that extracting the data in this way in order to secure a conviction might be justified if carried out with appropriate authorization. But clearly, keeping all that highly personal data as a matter of course, even if no charges are brought, is a breach of privacy and human rights.

It's also pretty pointless. After all, anyone who uses their phone for nefarious purposes will make sure that they can render the contents irrevocably inaccessible with just a couple of clicks - apps that let you do this are likely to proliferate in the wake of this latest development. So most of the data gathered by the police will be that of law-abiding citizens, who don't feel the need to take this precaution.

However, there is an interesting parallel here with the similarly unjustified retention of a suspect's DNA, even if no charges were brought, that took place routinely in the UK from 2004. The European Court of Human Rights deemed this a breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides a "Right to respect for private and family life", and the UK government was forced to change its approach. The same logic would seem to apply in the case of the digital DNA held on our mobile phones. Let's hope the UK police consider this before rolling out their disproportionate plans.

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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:

Fans in the crowd won't be allowed to upload snippets of the day's action to YouTube -- or even, potentially, to post their snaps from inside the Olympic Village on Facebook. And a crack team of branding "police", the Games organisers Locog have acknowledged, will be checking every bathroom in every Olympic venue -- with the power to remove or tape over manufacturers' logos even on soap dispensers, wash basins and toilets.

The same thing happened four years ago in Beijing as well, when non-sponsor brands were taped over in bathrooms so they didn't get "a free ride." That's because the real focus of the Olympic games is not anything the athletes might be doing, but keeping sponsors and business partners happy.

With just a little more than three months to go until the opening of the London 2012 Games, attention is increasingly turning to what many legal experts consider to be the most stringent restrictions ever put in place to protect sponsors' brands and broadcasting rights, affecting every athlete, Olympics ticket holder and business in the UK.

That's desperately sad. What is supposedly the greatest sporting event in the world could have been turned into the ultimate demonstration of how social media let spectators become participants through the real-time sharing of experiences.

Instead, the London 2012 organizing committee's obsession with policing brands and controlling what audiences do means that the recently-unveiled motto for this summer's games -- 'Inspire a generation' -- could hardly have been more inappropriate.

The young people that are meant to be inspired by the London games will find themselves forbidden to use properly the very means that would have let them do that: the social networks where they share their most important moments. As a result, London 2012 looks likely to be the most petty-minded and joyless Olympics so far.

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Here's a quick rundown on some upcoming events I'm involved in, leading off with a very exciting keynote brainstorming workshop at the INNOVATE / ACTIVATE conference in Berkeley on April 21st. As some of you know, we've run a bunch of brainstorming workshops either at our own events or as part of other events (as we're doing here). In this case, we'll be doing a brainstorming workshop around the question of "What does a proactive intellectual property agenda mean?" This is a question that has received a lot of attention over the past few months, since the SOPA fight. Lots of people who were involved in that battle came out of it wanting to do something positive to move the debates about IP towards fixing the problems associated with it, rather than just reacting defensively to efforts to expand a broken system. So we're going to brainstorm some ideas. The session will kick off with three (very) brief talks to get people thinking out of the box -- one by Nicole Ozer from the ACLU, one by Mike McGeary from Engine Advocacy, and one by me. From there, everyone will go into breakout groups with a specific brainstorming task for an hour, and then we'll regroup and discuss what the different groups came up with. These events are always thought-provoking and a lot of fun. I'd suggest coming to check it out, but I've been told that the event is already sold out.

Separately, this coming week, I'll be in Belgium on Wednesday, April 11th, taking part in a stakeholder hearing about ACTA at the European Parliament (which looks like it will be streamed live online). Two days later, I'll be in London, where I'll be hosting a discussion with Coadec talking about our recent Sky is Rising report (and I'm sure I'll also be discussing other policy/tech/business model issues as well). If you're unfamiliar with Coadec, it's a wonderful, UK-based organization, focused on helping the innovation community get involved and engaged in policy issues in the UK. That one is free and open to the public, so please come and join us. It should be a lot of fun.

After last year's riots in London, the British government established an independent panel to try to make some sense of what happened. Among the many things they examined were the claims by some that social media and text messaging were largely responsible, and that the government might need some kind of "kill switch" on these services to stop the same thing from happening again. The panel recently published an interim report, and their response to the social media question (as highlighted in the Guardian) is refreshing:

On the role of social networks, the panel concluded that rioters were aided by instant messaging services but warned against plans to shut down websites such as Twitter and Facebook. They pointed out that the UK has pledged support for the open use of social media during the Arab spring uprising across the Middle East.

"Mobile communications technology is continually evolving and new developments may benefit the police and authorities rather than rioters," the panel concluded. They added that some mobile networks have installed systems to detect crowds and the direction they are moving in so they can manage congestion.

"In the future, it may be possible to use cell congestion monitoring as a tool to tackle rioting," the report found. "What is clear from the riots is that there is no simple 'switch off' solution. Viral silence may have as many dangers as viral noise."

This touches on a couple of points we've made before—like the fact that smart cops can use social media to their advantage—but the highlight is the direct and unabashed comparison to the Arab spring riots. That's a controversial topic, with many people insisting that rioters in a democracy are fundamentally different than those in living under an oppressive regime. While I can see how people have less sympathy for the former, this argument has always bothered me, because it is used as justification for stronger methods (like shutting down Twitter) of stopping riots. That creates a strange paradox: the idea that oppressive measures are acceptable, but only for non-oppressive governments. While it's easy to look at some of the London rioters and see spoiled kids, it's important to remember that dictators see the rioters in their countries the same way.

So it's nice to see the panel underline the contradiction of supporting the open internet in the Middle East while wanting to control it at home. We've noted this exact hypocrisy at play in the U.S., where the State Department takes a vocal public stance in favor of an open internet around the world, while their diplomats quietly push copyright censorship systems in other countries—or where Joe Biden can opine against censorship while supporting SOPA and its censorship provisions. Of course, in that regard, the UK is not much better, and seems to have a similar blind spot when it comes to copyright law and the many ways it contradicts their stance on internet freedom.

We've discussed for many years how the Olympics has a ridiculously overaggressive approach to attacking free speech for those who criticize or mention aspects of the Olympics without permission. In most locations that host the Olympics, special extraordinary laws get passed against specific expressions around the Olympics that go beyond ordinary restrictions on speech. London, it seems, has been particularly willing to bend over backwards to appease the International Olympic Committee.

Take, for example, this story of a simple parody video about the 2012 Olympics that has been taken down over claims it violates the Olympics' IP rights. The video is clearly a parody, making use of the 2012 Olympics' creepy mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville, to show them in what appears to be a London riot (using some computer graphics work). The original video got about 90,000 views before being taken down. As the link above notes, there is no right to parody in the UK, so while it may be legal to have the video taken down, it's still ridiculous. The site linked above, LiberalConspiracy.org, insists that it'll keep posting the video if it gets taken down. But, as of the time I write this, I'm embedding the working version of the video, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's gone before too long. Honestly, the video seems pretty tame. Perhaps the Olympics thinks it hurts its "brand" to have such a video, but it sure seems like censoring parody videos does a hell of a lot more reputation damage to the Olympics than a silly parody video of its mascots.