Chemists Make Olympic Rings On a Molecular Scale 89
ananyo writes "Chemists in the UK have made a five-ring polyaromatic hydrocarbon and dubbed it 'olympicene'. The molecule is just a couple of nanometers wide and can be regarded as a little fragment of graphene. Strictly speaking, of course, the molecule might constitute an 'unofficial use' of the motif and land the scientists in court for copyright infringement."
Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah really. I read the headline and the thought which immediately sprang to mind turned out to be the third sentence of the summary.
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Except that the potential infringement is trademark, not copyright. Copyright has expired on the symbol, which was designed 100 years ago.
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Well yes, the summary did get that wrong. I meant the spirit, even if the letter wasn't exactly accurate.
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When?[citation needed]
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During the hellenistic greek era.
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When?[citation needed]
I'm sure there are instances after this one, but Jesse Owens [wikipedia.org] springs to mind.
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1972 [wikipedia.org]?
19 [wikipedia.org] 80 [wikipedia.org]?
oh wait, 3 of those 4 were notable for non-sports reasons...
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)
They are still meaningful to the athletes. The olympians that I have met (all Team USA Track & Field) pretty much ignore the politics as much as possible. They just want a chance to compete.
Then perhaps the athletes can organize and pay for their own show?
I personally gave up on them when they started letting Pro Athletes into the games. Those Basketball and Hockey dream teams were the exact opposite of what the games should be. I remember how exciting it was in th e1980 winter Olympics, when the US beat the professional (foro all intents and purposes) Russians. Fast forward to the professionals today, and you can understand why the world will root against you.
It was a disappointment when they changed the women's gymnastics purposefully to favor extreme small size. It changed that sport from graceful ladies to little trolls on the mats.
Finally, the endless "gifts" for the selection committees, the frank bribes as in the Salt Lake City incident, the corrupt judges, and you have a must miss event.
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I am so much more happy with my city now that the 2010 Olympics are behind us. It's like a veil of idiocy was lifted. For one thing, there a lot fewer short sighted mega-projects that will cost the taxpayer "nothing" (actually about 25 years of debt)
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but they've devolved into just another international political dog ® and pony(TM) show (© IOC 2012).
...fixed that for you...
(Disclaimer: I am not the official sarcastic git of the 2012 egg-and-spoon-race-named-after-a-Greek-mountain).
The Summer Event Police are coming (Score:5, Funny)
The Summer Event Police will be arresting them and locking them in the Twenty Twelve containment area under Stratford.
All worship our Penta-ringed overlords.
Trademark, not copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardcoded famous trademark (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hardcoded famous trademark (Score:4, Interesting)
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Which is why we should all avoid use of the term 'intellectual property [gnu.org]'. Use of the term promotes precisely this sort of confusion.
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I give people who confuse copyrights, trademarks, and patents and cannot reason about them the same consideration as people who consider LSD and heroin to be similar because they're both illegal drugs.
Cool, let's have a drugs flame war.
I'm betting that most slashdotters will be LSD fanboys, even though they've never taken either.
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As I understand it, countries that have hosted the Olympic Games have to treat the rings and other IOC symbols as hardcoded famous trademarks
Yeah, another example of how copyrights and trademarks can never die; 776 BC and it still hasn't expired.
Re:Hardcoded famous trademark (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Trademark, not copyright (Score:5, Informative)
Don't worry. The IOC and their local corporations that sponsor the games and license the trademarks are nothing if not diligent in defending their trademarks. When the winter olympics were held here in Vancouver in 2010, much to my dismay, they scanned the city and sent out letters to any business that had any word like olympic in it that they were infringing on their trademarks and had to desist. Poor old Olympic Pizza. They'd been in business for over 30 years under that name but now THEY were infringing. The copyright laws even were amended so that sentences with the words or phrases with the following strings in close proximity were copyright protected to the VOC; 2010, olympic, winter, and a number of sports names.
Dog and pony show where the venues are selected not by whether the community really wants/needs/can afford to host the games but by how much swag the selection committee can take away from that town. Our city and the local taxpayers are on the hook for almost $500 million for the real estate blunder that started as the place where the athletes were to be housed. And I don't want to know how much it cost to truck and helicopter in all the snow from the interior to blanket the mountains deep enough for the events to be held. What a waste. It sickens me every time I see a sign still up boasting about how Vancouver hosted the 2010 winter olympics. If it weren't for family concerns, I'd move to Owl's Anus, Alberta. Sorry, that turned into a rant but it felt very good to get it said. If anyone reading this ever gets a chance to speak out against or otherwise block their city from hosting an olympics, do it.
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Nothing like your games did just south of the boarder in Washington State. Recall that the state capitol is Olympia and we have the Olympic mountain range. I couldn't venture how many businesses have the name Olympic in the area. Lots of nasty legal letters flying around back then.
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Nothing like your games did just south of the boarder in Washington State. Recall that the state capitol is Olympia and we have the Olympic mountain range. I couldn't venture how many businesses have the name Olympic in the area. Lots of nasty legal letters flying around back then.
How about the Ancient Greek city of Olympia * sues the fucking IOC for several hundreds of billions of euros for persistent and blatant infringement of their name?
Might even solve the Greek debt crisis.
* There must be something left there still.
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Re:Trademark, not copyright (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't see how it's relevant, since the Olympic Committee isn't a profit making corporation, but is actually only a group who organise a non-profit event for the promotion of sports worldwide, right? What's a trademark if they're not actually trading in anything after all.
Re:Trademark, not copyright (Score:4, Informative)
I don't see how it's relevant, since the Olympic Committee isn't a profit making corporation, but is actually only a group who organise a non-profit event for the promotion of sports worldwide, right? What's a trademark if they're not actually trading in anything after all.
The Olympics haven't been non-profit in many years. (I'm sure they're officially non-profit for tax purposes, but not in the "we don't make money at this" sense).
For instance, between 2005-2008, the IOC (home of "Olympics, Inc.") generated nearly six billion dollars in revenue [businessinsider.com]. And remember, the terms of hosting the Games is that you, not they, are responsible for any and all cost overruns.
There's plenty of reading out there showing the real reasons why cities and countries bid for the Five Ring Circus. (Vancouver in particular is a nice case study.)
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I don't see how it's relevant, since the Olympic Committee isn't a profit making corporation, but is actually only a group who organise a non-profit event for the promotion of sports worldwide, right? What's a trademark if they're not actually trading in anything after all.
Was that a joke? Now drop your daily gifts off with the selection committee, and stop talking.
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This unauthorised work is a violation of the Olympic Symbol etc. (Protection) Act 1995 [legislation.gov.uk], London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 [legislation.gov.uk] and other criminal acts. (It is also trivial work based on Dietrich-Buchecker, Sauvage & Kern, 1984.)
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>>Aren't the rings a trademark, not a copyright?
The Olympic Rings have super special protection under the law. Not only are other people not able to use the Olympic Rings without permission, but you are not able to make ANY logo with five interlocking rings on it, even if they look nothing like the Olympic Logo.
Look at what the back of the Legend of the 5 Rings card game used to look like versus what they look like now: ...afte
http://www.lizdanforth.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/L5R-backs-300x255.jpg [lizdanforth.com]
They get the gold in the nerd olympics (Score:5, Funny)
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no violation (Score:1)
the olympic rings are interconnected, and coloured.
this is just 5 (admittedly very small) circles pressed up against each other... blurry ones at that.
Category error (Score:3)
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To be fair, when their own enforcement officers can't tell the difference, why expect a little news article to get it right?
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4342335/Olympic-ban-for-florist.html [thesun.co.uk]
Coca-Cola threatened her for copyright infringement over their trademark. It was said literally one sentence after another.
So I in fact think it is perfectly justified to *repeat* the threats of trademark infringement and copyright infringement as Coca-Cola themselves have stated.
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It's of dubious usefulness. Inevitably, several groups will cite this paper for its synthetic route when making something more complicated based on this structure, but the chances that this exact molecule will be used for anything are very slim - simple multicyclic polyaromatics have been done to death and have crappy efficiency as solar cells (too narrow of an absorption cross-section), and don't really see much use for anything beyond building blocks for other, more interesting, molecules. It may turn o
Doubly sad (Score:5, Insightful)
The first thing I thought as soon as I read the first sentence was that the Olympic authorities would be all over them. The second was seeing that the submitter had also thought the same thing.
Just another indication of how badly the Olympics have been corrupted--and how they in turn corrupt the IP laws of host countries like a cancer.
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We've been watching the torch being bussed around the country via the BBC's live stream. I don't know about other countries, but ours have flashing 30mph signs that only flash when you're going above the speed limit. We've been counting...
I'm not doing so well at the game. I've only counted them speeding twice.
The laws don't apply to those in charge.
Corrupted.
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We've been watching the torch being bussed around the country via the BBC's live stream.
Erm, why?
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We've been watching the torch being bussed around the country via the BBC's live stream.
Erm, why?
I'd guess they're bored, stoned students waiting for the end of term and with no exams to worry about, but that might be unfair.
It's also entirely possible they're a dangerous bunch of anarchist terrorists plotting to disrupt the mythical passage of the Torch through Albion for their own seedy ends.
close, except the olympic rings... (Score:5, Informative)
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Does the original design fit into the tolerances of this system? If so, it's not a nitpick.
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Anti-aliasing (Score:2)
my thought exactly (Score:2)
6 ring carbon is too constrained to link within each other, so pick some other ring structures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterocyclic_compound [wikipedia.org]
or better yet, a different ring structure for each color (yellow would be cyclo-octasulfur, pyridine for green, etc.)
then build them interlocking
to actually formulate this would win the team a nobel prize, so complex would it be
oh... a nobel, not an olympics gold
Not linked! (Score:2, Interesting)
Well it's OK I suppose, but the rings in the olympiadane molecule are properly linked, and that was synthesized already back in 1994.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympiadane
Rather apt (Score:5, Funny)
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Rather apt i'd say considering so many of the athletes are chemistry buffs themselves. I care not a jot.
Rather apt i'd say considering so many of the athletes are chemically buffed themselves.
:)
FTFY
The IOC lawyers would sue but (Score:2)
first they have to find the offending molecule
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"Umm, no, I will not be clicking 'like'." (Score:1)
I'm gonna guess these are the same guys who made the ring for Mr. Facebook's wife.
It's time to disband the IOC and reboot the games. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the IOC has strayed way too far from the original principles of the olympic games and it might be time to reboot the games.
We all have a responsibility to "vote" with our wallets and eyes by refusing to buy anything related to the olympics and to not watch the games. Stop the madness and save the original spirit of the games. The games were supposed to be about amateur sport, not money.
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Good luck with that.
Myself, I haven't watched the games in decades nor have I bought anything "Olympic". You're only starting now?
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The games were supposed to be about amateur sport, not money.
Well, that was fine in pre First World War Europe when only gentlemen sportsmen competed (in between running the Empire and big game hunting), but it's a bit irrelevant nowadays.
i demand ICE seize the domain of these terrorists (Score:2)
stealing intellectual property is NOT ok. why is Obama allowing the terrorists to win?
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I demand drone strikes on the laboratory!
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I demand drone strikes on the laboratory!
Hold on, the IOC has its own military now? Maybe that means here in the UK we won't have to provide them with free police and military cover.
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No, obviously they would be provided and paid for by the UK as a result of contractual provisions in London hosting agreement. Don't tell me there's no Drone Strike Clause. How could the IOC overlook that?
Might get sued? (Score:2)
No, you can count on it.
Five Circles (Score:2)
To be honest, the photo of it reminds me more of a very common arrangment in which 5 spherical objects can be laid out. There's almost nothing about it that reminds me of the olympic rings. The colors aren't there, the rings don't overlap, and the circles look more like hexagons.
Basically, it just looks like some molecule to me...
Dear nano-chemists: (Score:2)
Thank you for your ambitious start. Please do us all a favour and shrink the rest of the Olympics down to that size too!
Sincerely,
The citizens of the host contries paying the massive public debt for the private advertising spectacle every 2 years.
Already has been done. (Score:1)
Sigh.. (Score:2)
Another example of overblown novelty... AFM is nothing new, and "olympicene" is also nothing new.. it's been made before... at least as early as 1965.. and possibly earlier still (haven't looked deeply in the scifinder databases).
Here's a literature citation (something the parent article sorely lacks) with proof. You know.. the stuff science is supposedly made of ?
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/1965/JR/jr9650005920 [rsc.org]
London Olympics (Score:2)
It's going to be a fucking nightmare. If I still had a house there, I'd burn it down now, collect the insurance and piss off abroad for a couple of months.
When it has eventually struggled back to life from the smoking ruins left by rioting crazed crowds driven to madness by blocked roads and stationary trains, there will probably be some good property bargains to be had.