Canadian DMCA Bill Within Six Weeks

If I could ask a favour please, could you share your letter here so it is easier for others like myself to draft our own?

>Why does it have to take the people 1000x the effort to get a bill killed as it does to lobby it into existence?

Because 1000 x $0.32 stamps < 1 x $$$$ donation to the MP's party

When I was 19 just over a decade ago and the music industry was just catching onto CD burning and MP3s, I wrote directly to some Canadian lobbyists. At the time they were pushing for levies on recordable CDs. Considering CDs ran almost a $1 per disc and I was a university student, this hit home. I told them that they just didn't understand the situation, that the Internet changed everything, and that they wouldn't be growing their revenues with this CD levy because distribution would move away from physical media anyhow. I also called shenanigans on how they would actually distribute the proceeds to Canadian artists seeing as how most of the pirated material was from non-Canadian artists. The organization appeared to be a one man show for the most part, and that gentleman wrote back to me, disagreed, and suggested that I could meet him in Ottawa because they were going to lobby until they got their way.

Lobbying is frustrating because it works. A lot of legislation is essentially drafted behind closed doors by special interests, then revised within a particular ministry before getting a seal of approval vote by the legislature. In fact, that's probably how just about everything short of a private members' bill is done these days.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. There are businesses and individuals that have interests which will be harmed by these laws. What this group needs to do is hire its own lobbying group. Otherwise, the debate is being framed in terms of "Canadians are pirates" and "Canada needs to get with the program and adopt laws that other countries have". Michael Geist has probably single-handedly done more to thwart these laws than anyone else. But I'm sure that the other side has full time consultants on hand. The lobbyists have a lot more energy only because the opposition has not figured out that if they band together under an umbrella, their focussed energy is much greater.

Because they only need to pass it once.

The same happened here in the Netherlands with the EU charter, we got to vote on it, voted no, they kept repeating it until not enough people showed up and rammed it down our throats under a different name.

The copyleft lobby actually has more energy, but in this case the public consultation was ignored. What the intellectual property lobby has is more dear to the hearts of politicians: money and connections.

Actually, it's not quite that simple in Canada.

Corporate contributions to political parties have been effectively cut off by the current Prime Minister (Harper), you can only do personal donations and only up to $1100 per person.

Harper had a lot of grassroots conservative support and the liberals had a lot of corporate support. The liberals were basically financially devastated and have had to build up from scratch (doing better now).

Still, the US has a strong pull with Harper, he looooves capitalism.

Seriously, our zeal to push the DMCA into every other country on the planet is bordering on creepy. Whether or not you think it would be good if that happened, it is not worth the amount of effort it's getting. Is the media industry really that powerful here?

> but "senior officials" from Washington should be saving their political clout for legitimate international issues.

How about not?

Think of it as taking one for the team. The time that they spend screwing up Canada is time that they can't spend screwing up something else.