Write in on this. Be firm, and demand that your copyright law is made by your representatives, not your lobbyists.

(Currently writing to my MP on much the same lines. But that doesn’t help in the US; you Americans are going to have to do that part.)

And to be clear, copyright isn’t just for the creators, it’s to strike a balance between giving the creators and incentive and making works available for the public to use. More recently I suspect it’s also about giving the public the ability to find more innovated uses of copy-written material that wasn’t anticipated even a few years ago. (Which potentially leads to both more creators and more availability.)

Senators and representatives get LOTS of mail, but a depressingly small proportion of that is articulate and to-the-point. If you are both, and can distinguish yourself from the mass of half-baked angry rants and auto-generated astroturf, your issue CAN get onto the member’s radar.

Note, though, that paper mail while carrying some weight (obviously, it takes more time and therefore, there’s less of it than email), it takes an extraordinarily long time to get to a member’s attention, because post-anthrax, the letters have to get irradiated first. So a concise, well-directed phone call can work, too. Keep in mind that if you are cold-calling, you will likely be talking to an intern or lower-level staffer. That is not a defeat. They will record the overall gist of your message and pass it on. Keep in mind, you’re not going to get to debate your points to win someone over, you’re basically “voting” in an unscientific poll. State your position, one or two good supporting arguments for it, and be clear and polite. These poor folks have to deal with a lot of yelling from crazies.

Faxes and email are also good, and always faster than mail.

There are two ways to figure our who to target with your message: leadership and your representative.

Again, if you’re cold-calling, or if you’re contacting them because you have strong feelings on an issue (but aren’t necessarily directly tied to that issue somehow), your own senators and representative are the best bet. Non-constituents don’t matter so much–after all, their job is to represent their state/district, so a PA senator is going to weigh the opinion of a Pittsburgher more than that of a New Yorker.

Otherwise, if it’s a specific issue you’re interested in, figure out which committees have jurisdiction over the issue (copyright is Judiciary in both House and Senate, trade (since ACTA is being framed as a trade agreement) is in the Subcommittee on Trade within Ways and Means in the House, and in the Subcommittee on International Trade in the Finance Committee in the Senate). If your Senator or Representative is on those subcommittees or committees, you’ve got extra firepower. If not, you might take a stab at contacting the committee or subcommittee leadership–the Chair and Ranking [minority party] Members of the committee.

Ah crap, hope this was interesting/useful enough to justify its length.

If any of the money went to the people who actually create the songs, then I MIGHT be a little more supportive of efforts to stop piracy. But it seems like most of the money goes to the parasites that feed off of the artists.

1. ISPs add a small levy to all subscriptions
2. copyright is abolished on the internet — everything is freely usable
3. usage and preference of internet content is surveyed with various statistical measures
4. producers compete for popularity
5. the ISP subscription levy is distributed to producers according to the measures

That basic system works for televised football for the UK Premier League. With appropriate dedication it can work for the internet. It is not like flying to Mars, it is eminently doable.

Copyright is merely one possible economic system. When circumstances render it impractical or troublesome, the intelligent thing to do is replace it with something better.

Neither being big, employing people nor getting vast economic growth is a valid reason to legitimate such drastic measures. We see the results of AIG and Goldman-Sachs, who were big and great employers, too – they only cost the taxpayers a lot of bucks. Moreso, if really everyone violates copyright, it may be not a real right in the first place, but rather a wrong.

Greetings, LX

I believe ISP’s will have to charge a large amount to purchase and monitor software to detect copyrighted materials, not to mention the responsibilities associated with notification of copyright violations and black listing 3 time offenders.

Taking this to it’s conclusion, ISP’s tasked with eliminating violations can use 1 of 2 approaches: monitor every type of connection for violations or restrict all but the most basic connection types and monitor those. This would result in most ports being blocked and services like BitTorrent being effectively banned.

Perhaps a lot less may happen but doesn’t ACTA open the door to this kind of censorship?

I’m going to admit some ignorance here so go easy on me.

I’m asking for a BASIC tutorial on the intellectual property/copyright issue to get me up to speed so I can stop spacing out whenever these articles are posted. I’m usually pretty well informed on a lot of issues so, if I’m spacing out when this comes up, I’m pretty sure others are, too.

To give you a baseline, here’s my current understanding.

1. Most people, except for the most devoted of the voluntaryists, accept a proper role of the government as enforcing contracts.

2. When a creative person creates some (oh, what do they call it?) intellectual property, they are free to release it with the understanding (contract?) that the government will enforce a general contract called copyright. They are also free to release it under an understanding (contract?) that imposes greater or lesser restrictions than what is provided by copyright.

3. Whatever government gets involved in will become increasingly influenced by large interests who seek to use the government’s power to give them a competitive advantage.

There are some holes in the understanding I’ve communicated here. I can see that #3 undermines #1, but I don’t see an alternative. I’m inviting you to identify the rest of the holes and what is missing that will get me up to speed on the issues you’re posting about. I’m not even sure what questions I’m supposed to be asking to get up to speed on this topic.

,DP

You can link to specific in YouTube videos. For free.

Spend 90 minutes writing a letter to your elected representatives on the subject. Then send the letter to them.

In this day of polls and petitions on the internet, we’ve forgotten our right to write, and the power that our letters wield. I wrote to my representatives on an important issue, and received both phonecalls AND action(!) on the issue.

Don’t waste your time in the comments section here or anywhere else on the web. Take the direct, legal action available to you.

The problem is that copyright is a poor system for the public overall: both intrinsically, and particularly in the circumstances of the internet.

Copying and sharing cultural items is good, and producing cultural items is good. Copyright encourages production — good, but only by restricting sharing — bad. It is intrinsically a self-frustrating system.

Copyright is also a monopoly, which is economically inefficient and harmful. It funds production by keeping prices of copies high. But with the internet the true cost of copying is practically zero, so the economic/public badness has become unusually large.

There certainly could be a role for government in a system for cultural production. But copyright is clearly a bad, broken choice, and a better one — like Dean Baker’s voucher one, or my suggestion earlier — should now be set up to replace it.

I already KNOW that the ACTA negotiations are entirely controlled by the entertainment industry – it’s been true of EVERY government copyright/IP regulatory process in the last 20 years. I’m not sure 90 minutes of video further proving that is going to do in a positive sense?

I see no options other than opting-out of popular culture when it is served through restrictions in my fair use rights – I spend my money on video games, dish TV, netflix, DVDs, CDs, DRM free MP3 and streaming audio. I will not purchase itunes, blue-ray or any current ebooks.

Nah. I know what is needed to know about ACTA already. I’ll spend the next 90 minutes being intensely productive at unabashed online piracy instead.