The "Campaign for Creativity" is an astro-turf letter-writing campaign that aims to get people to write to MEPs demanding even stronger copyright laws for Europe:
I am writing to say that it is important to me that Europe has strong intellectual property laws in place and that they are enforced properly.
The creative industries are under assault from pirates, counterfeiters and those who want weaken or remove the protections that enable the creative industries to function. 17,000 jobs a year and billions of Euros are lost every year because the IP laws are weak or not enforced.
Please support us when you're elected. We're counting on you!
But you can write your own letter and paste it in. Here's the full text of mine, and an excerpt:
File-sharing is part of the traditional cycle of new technology development:
from the phonorecord to the VCR, from the radio to the satellite service, every
new technology that lowered the barriers to reproducing and distributing
copyrighted works has had to make use of the popular media of the day to conjure
itself into existence — usually over the howls of protest of rights-holders who
were merely the legitimized pirates of from the last fight.When the phonorecord people bitterly fought radio, they conveniently forgot that
they'd built their business through widescale infringement of the sheet-music
publishers. It's no different today: filmmakers (who enthusiastically violated
Edison's film patents), broadcasters (who played records without permission or
payment), cablecasters (who pirated free-to-air signals for their networks) and
even hybrid entertainment/electronics companies (like Sony, whose piratical VCR
was characterized by the motion-picture people as the certain death of the film
industry) are all standing shoulder to shoulder in the fight against programmers
and ordinary citizens who have, once again, discovered a better way to
distribute and reproduce creative works.It's no surprise that these pirates of the entertainment industry want to pull
the ladder up behind them and dog the hatch. After all, the traditional role of
inventors has been to create massive new revenue opportunities for the
entertainment industry, and the traditional response of the entertainment
companies has been to seek legislative relief from those opportunities.
(Thanks, Alice!)
