31–40 of 108 posts
If you want this to pass, don't sign the petition, and don't email or write your congresscritter. Call them . Interact with a human being in their office. Anecdotally, that has a much greater impact. (Source: my cousin and his wife were congressional staffers for several years.)
Is there a website where we can easily find our rep's phone number?
If you want this to pass, don't sign the petition, and don't email or write your congresscritter. Call them . Interact with a human being in their office. Anecdotally, that has a much greater impact. (Source: my cousin and his wife were congressional staffers for several years.)
Is there a website where we can easily find our rep's phone number?
If you want this to pass, don't sign the petition, and don't email or write your congresscritter. Call them . Interact with a human being in their office. Anecdotally, that has a much greater impact. (Source: my cousin and his wife were congressional staffers for several years.)
The reason this is, BTW, is that calling isn't scalable. Any idiot can fire off emails or print petitions or print and mail letters (albeit with a budget). Fielding calls is a huge pain in the ass and can be linked - via area code+prefix, among others - to a specific district.
More seriously though, I have definite plans to build a click-to-call tool in the next couple of weeks, but this news was sprung on my late yesterday, leading to a mad rush to get that page ready in time for this morning. Next time there's an action like this for FixtheDMCA, there'll definitely be a way to call. And if I build it I'll almost certainly open source it so others can do the same. Sunlight Labs have a great API for looking up rep's phone numbers that means its really just a Twilio integration away.
This legislation doesn't entirely fix the DMCA. It fixes some problems but more remain. Copyright is some seriously fucked up shit right now. It has been dominated by big money interests for the last 50 years.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Refusing to settle for anything short of perfect is often a bad trait, sure.
But if you don't have a "perfect" goal to aim for, what you end up with is going to be worse than it could have been.
Seriously? C'mon!
If you want this to pass, don't sign the petition, and don't email or write your congresscritter. Call them . Interact with a human being in their office. Anecdotally, that has a much greater impact. (Source: my cousin and his wife were congressional staffers for several years.)
This legislation doesn't entirely fix the DMCA. It fixes some problems but more remain. Copyright is some seriously fucked up shit right now. It has been dominated by big money interests for the last 50 years.
If you want this to pass, don't sign the petition, and don't email or write your congresscritter. Call them . Interact with a human being in their office. Anecdotally, that has a much greater impact. (Source: my cousin and his wife were congressional staffers for several years.)
Is there any reason not to support this? What negative impacts could this have towards the companies that this effects?
I want to know this too. When I see thing like "This fixes the DMCA", it makes me question the intentions of the advocating website. It sounds too good to be true.
A very lovely lawyer by the name of Jennifer Granick at Stanford Cyberlaw helped me out pro bono, the case was dropped, and Jennifer went on to petition the Librarian of Congress to have an exemption for unlocking added. That exemption was granted in 2006, renewed in 2009, then dropped in 2012. I haven't been in the unlocking business for a long time, but I thought I should do something about it. I started the WH petition, which got 114k signatures and a positive response from the WH. But I realized that the real culprit is DMCA Section 1201, it really is just a really poorly written law, and it effects a whole load of people. So, with the help of some friends (shout outs to Azat, Joe, Austin and Dmitri) we threw up the FixtheDMCA site over the course of three days, and I've been maintaining it since. Meanwhile I've been trying to coordinate with folks like the EFF and Public Knowledge who are pushing things on the DC side.
For me it's kind of a fun break from startups, and I kind of feel like it's paying back the favor J. Granick did to me back when I was a college student.
I would really love to hear some decent, reasoned arguments why the DMCA shouldn't be fixed (and by fixed I mean limited to cases of copyright infringement only), as I think at a certain point the content lobbies will probably start making them and I'd love to have responses ready.