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Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures

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Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures

#81

Post by dragonwriter »

nateabele wrote: post #66
kaybe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can recommend this article: http://swampland.time.com/2013/01/31/we-the-people/ It argues that the reason for petitions to exist is the possibility to open a dialog to the people who are concerned about certain topics (because the petition website gets your email adress), and that in the time of fractioning news consumption it is a useful way to keep communicating, whatever that means. edit: Ok, why the heck do the…

Maybe I'm just cynical (okay, I'm probably just cynical), but that looks like a slightly more positive spin on essentially the same idea: a whole lot of 'communicating' and no action. > edit: Ok, why the heck do they call their page Swampland? Probably because it's about politics, and according to popular myth, DC was built on a swamp.

Its worth noting that Barack Obama, even before he was President, was very big on encouraging people to reject the "big hero to rescue us" model and take action to make change themselves.

If you recognize that people who want change have been writing individually to the White House to get it for generations, redirecting some of that mostly-invisible-to-others mechanism of feedback (which, because of the volume, is pretty much guaranteed to generally produce generic responses and little action) to a mechanism where requests and the responses can be highly visible and serve as vehicle for groups to raise interest and propel a conversation that then extends beyond the WH petition forum, it has some value.

If you look at the response from the WH as the end of the process that the petition starts, sure, its not particularly useful. But that's, I think, misunderstanding the point rather badly.

Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures

#82

Post by dragonwriter »

pessimizer wrote: post #27
pyre wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when is the President a 'lawmaker?' If you want to get law-makers (i.e. legislators) to take notice just write your representative a letter.

As the guy who signs bills into law, and as the head of his party (meaning that he dictates how they are going to be whipped) he is lawmaker number 1.

The President may be nominal head of the party, but whips take direction, insofar as they take it at all, from the caucus leadership in the house of Congress in which they sit, not from the general leadership of the party. The US doesn't have a strong unitary party system of the kind you might find in a typical Westminster system (of course, in a Westminster system, the head of government would also be the leader of the party sitting in the primary house of the legislature, not a separately-elected official outside of that house.)

Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures

#83

Post by jobu »

Fast forward to next week:

"The White House announces a new threshold of 500,000 signatures before it will respond to online petitions."

I was initially enthusiastic about these online petitions, but it doesn't seem like any of them have had an effect.

Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures

#84

Post by dragonwriter »

gesman wrote: post #42

Would be great to have this: collect 1,000,000 votes for petition and it goes to Senate for mandatory voting. Otherwise it's impossible to penetrate the wall between government and people via "your vote, we write response, maybe" - type of approach.

> Would be great to have this: collect 1,000,000 votes for petition and it goes to Senate for mandatory voting.

Heck, we don't even have a "collect singatures of a majority of Senators and it goes to the Senate for mandatory voting" rule, so its not surprising that we don't have a "collect signatures of less than 1% of eligible voters and it goes to the Senate for mandatory voting" rule.

Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures

#85

Post by sp332 »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #74
sp332 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a bad idea. In fact many states have implemented this already. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiatives_and_referendums_in...

Majority rules is just another tyranny.

It really has nothing to do with majorities.

Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures

#86

Post by malandrew »

sinak wrote: post #44

Hey everyone, I started this petition. Very glad we made it to 100k, and excited to see how the White House responds. I'm well aware that the WH may not take any real action though. Please sign up at http://fixthedmca.org if you care about this issue and want to continue helping the move to fix this issue permanently.

Seems like we'd be better off with a system just like the Whitehouse one but designed for petitioning both the President and our representatives at the same time. At the end of the day, the executive branch doesn't make laws. It just signs them at the end of the process.

Fixing the DMCA needs to start in the legislative branch (or be ruled unconstitutional by the judicial).

The petition system should geolocate you, suggest who your representative is and make sure that you sign a petition on a national issue that is delivered to your representative together with only the signatures of other constituents in that representatives district. I reckon the system should also prompt you to forward the petition not only to friends and family with the same representative as yourself, but also friends and family who live in districts that haven't received many signatures yet (i.e. it should help fill in the holes).

Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures

#87

Post by khuey »

pyre wrote: post #17
duaneb wrote: post #6

What exactly do these petitioners expect? A) there are far more important things to do, IMHO, then spending time wrestling telco companies over this, and B) the White House has to do zilch but respond. I love petitions, but people getting angry over e.g. repeatedly not legalizing marijuana after 0.03% of americans signed something I find confusing and frustrating. It's almost as if people are easier to ignore if they…

This was a recent change by made by the copyright office, to revoke "phone unlocking" as an exception to the DMCA. The copyright office is under the President, IIRC, so the White House has the ability to directly affect this. The other route is to just codify the exception into law, but pushing a law through about this takes time.

It's the Library of Congress, and they didn't revoke the exception so much as they failed to renew it.

Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures

#88

Post by jdechko »

Alex3917 wrote: post #80
mtgx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I think financing campaigns should only be done by individuals and with a cap of $100 each to "equalize" the money vote, just like you equalize the regular vote, by giving a person the same vote everyone gets. But the way the system works now, the "money vote" seems to be much more powerful than the real vote, and because certain individuals or corporations can put as much money as they want on that vote,…

The real problem is there aren't enough congress people. If we multiplied the number of house and senate seats by 10, in order to bring the ratio of citizens to representatives back to the original levels, then it would solve 95% of the problems even without comprehensive finance reform.

The real problem is that there are too many congress people. We have 535 congress members trying to come to an agreement on important things like actually developing a working budget. Can you imagine over 5,000 people voicing opinions on what a budget ought to look like?

Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures

#89

Post by Nursie »

jobu wrote: post #83

Fast forward to next week: "The White House announces a new threshold of 500,000 signatures before it will respond to online petitions." I was initially enthusiastic about these online petitions, but it doesn't seem like any of them have had an effect.

Are they new? We've had them in the UK starting from about 7 or 8 years ago, unsure if we still do.

All that ever happened when one reached the 'must get a response' threshold was some staffer would write a couple of quick sentences about how they weren't going to do whatever the thing was, and how you were wrong for wanting it.

Useless exercise all round.

Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures

#90

Post by TylerE »

riggins wrote: post #77
jfb wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you going to find 100M people who agree on what is in the public interest?

How are you going to find 100M people who agree on what is in the public interest? well how about phone unlocking? I struggle to see the case for having locked phones. My first cut would be an appeal like 'the phone companies are trying to steal money out of your pocket. It's un-American. You should be free to do what you want with you phone.'

Ok, the case for locked phones is that you can get a $600 phone for $200.

If you want to truly OWN your device, you can pay fair market value for it, and get service from whoever you want.

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