Aaron Swartz has written a great letter to his Congresscritters, asking them to stem the blood-tide of rotten Internet legislation. Why not adapt it and send to your own lawmaker?
I hope you see the pattern here. When considering such bills, I urge you to ask a simple question: What's the harm? The fact is, there is no harm. Music companies claim that five times the number of records sold are being traded on the Internet. Five times! I'm sure they'd have fancy statistics saying that this added up to a quadrillion dollars in lost revenue. But this makes the false assumption that all the downloads would have normally been CD sales. Instead, music sales have only dropped five percent. Five percent! Now the music industry changed the way they counted, raised prices for CDs and the economy has entered a downturn. All of those could have accounted for the five percent. But even if they didn't, can you seriously claim that we need all the measures described above for a five percent drop in sales?
