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Comment by blintson | Hacker News Reader

Bitching about it accomplishes nothing. I doubt there's anybody here who thinks this is a good thing, and even if there were, that sort of language persuades nobody. The smart thing to do is to write your congressman, and get people together to protest. Anybody here have any experience with politics and know what we could do to stop this?

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You are right: bitching does nothing, yet writing our representatives is almost as bad. I interned for a certain senator a while back—all the letters that people sent in were recorded as tallies in a system, and the responses were typed up by office staff. By the way: most of the letters which were sent in were spam—the same letter with different signatures.

I think calling might be considered more effective. It shows that you are willing to invest enough time and actually make your concerns heard. I think they might weight calls like TV networks. Your 1 call counts as 1,000 people who wouldn't care to call. Of course the most effective thing to do would be to befriend your congressman personally.

On a larger scale, organizing a sort of free internet seal of approval for all representatives could be even more powerful. If representatives know that voters would be more likely to vote for candidates with the seal of approval, then they might be persuaded to earn that seal.

Sometimes others find the words better than I can, so I sign a generic form letter to my member of Parliament. It's not really spam. It's heartfelt.

Edit: I just wanted to add that while generally I agree that writing letters has little to no effect, I think it's important for people to start DOING something. If it starts with writing letters, maybe the upshot will be that people are embolded to participate in bigger future actions, like taking part in demonstrations and more when the time comes. Cynicism and defeatism aren't the right starting attitudes for a fight. Just my two cents.

I don't actually see anything wrong with that. The problem is that they don't seem to do anything with the numbers they gather.

Very true. From what I understood, the data was nothing more than something for the senator to chew on.

Spam? My signature is valuable, even if attached to a petition. Shame on you.

so there's no point in ever crafting a nice letter? good to know.

Protesting does nothing.

edit: I'm specifically talking about in-the-streets-marches kind of thing.

Then what? It's better than complaining on a website where everybody agrees with you. I'm going to do something. We've got to do something. The situation's bad enough as it is.

I agree with you. If the entire tech community was up in arms about this (assuming the treaty is really as bad as this article says), I think politicians would notice. They are not all in the pay of the movie business. The more neutral ones might wake up if it appeared the treaty was going to do net damage to the US economy.

From the wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War )

"According to the French academic Dominique Reynié, between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war.[3]"

Protests don't seem to have a very good track record.

I'm not just (or even) talking about people taking to the streets. If this report is accurate, the treaty would hurt VCs, and VCs aren't powerless.

should this prove to be true, this is an excellent opportunity for [google | yahoo | microsoft | apple | facebook | any other major tech company that relies on people making things with computers] to petition against this with their ad dollars in a very vocal manner. being the first to rally people against this seems like it'd be far more culturally relevant in the long term than spending the money on a superbowl ad and billboard campaign saying "my brand is good".

does the EFF lobby?

if not, maybe what we need an organization to lobby on our behalf.

maybe a new startup could somehow do this? i don't know how it would get the money to do so...

Destroy them, fund the competition. Boycott any company that encourages the use of DRM. Pirate their products and distribute them via encrypted, untraceable networks like TOR, or plain old sneaker-net. Support individuals and companies who avoid DRM, who treat their users with respect, and who distribute their works directly, etc.

I don't know. We're probably fucked.

If you believe you can stop this by writing to your congressperson or protesting: why do you think this is being done in secrecy? Obviously, they are fully aware nobody is going to like it. It will be enacted regardless.

That being said, I would still like to do as much as I can to prevent it, or in the case that it's enacted, circumvent it or corrupt it to the point of uselessness. At this stage, I don't think there's much we can do just yet. We also can't be sure this report is accurate.

We find a silly case under this law that would've been legal previously, then get a few hundred thousand (or more) people to download it, willingly putting the content up in violation all at once. Civil disobedience isn't the best choice necessarily, but it can work quite well in situations like this.

Why hasn't this worked for the DMCA?

Little organization. There haven't been any well organized attacks on the DMCA, which is necessary for it to work.

You could always create a worm that installs utorrent and starts downloading any popular file going.

Once the worm is in the field then how will they tell who are real pirates or hapless victims?

I think the more conscionable peaceful protest would be to wardrive around your town and download various torrents through any and all wifi APs that you can access.

This wouldn't require violating anyone else's machines, but would have much the same effect. (presenting the ISP with the prospect of cutting off a huge percentage of their customers, i.e. revenue)

Yes but that requires serious logistics to do on a massive scale, furthermore peaceful was never a caveat. People are saying "what can we do? what power do we have?". As programmers we could do that. I'm not saying that is the right choice.

It only took a handful of lunch counters and a handful of busses.

With today's media, it certainly wouldn't take more than a handful of towns. Most of us probably have enough people in our personal social graph to pull it off.

Protesting might be a first step, but what really counts is organizing. The Pirate Party started in 2006 and now has a man (and maybe soon a woman) in the European Parliament and active parties in a dozen countries. I know some people are skeptical to the whole phenomenon, but that's mostly because they don't understand where it came from. I'm not saying that starting a political party is the right thing to do in the US, but organizing and getting heard probably is.

Yes, due the Lisbon treaty the Pirate Party will have a second chair in the European Parliament.

...but the EP is a puppet compared to the ECs (Council and Commission)

I'm afraid you might be right about that :-/

Most protests do nothing, but at a certain point protests can bring down governments. That's why the Tienanmen square massacre happened and why the more recent Iranian election protests were violently stopped.

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