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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

All those companies are there precisely as cover for the few that really drive the lobbying efforts, so that people like you can pop up on the internet and say how it is not just a minority of companies perverting the law in their own favor. You can fall for it or you can see through it (assuming you are not a paid shill in the first place) - I think we should see through it and call it for what it is: a small minority of enormous companies manipulating laws in their own favor and to the detriment of the people.

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I guess that's one perspective. For those that do want a list of the "big" companies, here are the ones that I recognize and thought of as "big names":

    3M
    Adobe Systems
    Boston Scientific
    Dolby Laboratories
    The Dow Chemical Company
    DuPont
    Fairchild Semiconductor
    Fairfield Crystal Technology
    General Electric
    IBM
    IEEE-USA
    Johnson & Johnson
    Microsoft
    Procter & Gamble
    Qualcomm
    Xerox Corporation

This is probably not a complete list, since I am not very tuned in and may not be familiar with the "big names" that others are.

Things like "Medical Device Manufacturers Association" probably count in that list as they exist solely as a lobbying group. http://www.medicaldevices.org/

The point is not which big companies have signed the document - the question is which companies have attached $donations$ to their signature.

Driverdan, the user you're responding to, has been here for nearly five years.

Insinuating that they may be a paid shill is truly obnoxious behavior.

That's a reasonable criticism, and I would certainly agree such an insinuation would be a step too far. However I would also argue that the tone and context of my comment make it quite clear that I don't consider the poster to be a shill, but merely allow for that possibility in qualifying my statements, which is quite different to what you are suggesting.

Since accusations of "shilling" have been made anyway, check this out: Remember when the Judge made his "Name Your Shills" order in Oracle v Google? Guess what! The author of TFA was named in Google's list of shills! I guess that makes him a legally certified shill! And since you're so quick to support the author's viewpoint...

To be fair, I don't think the author's a shill. But I've been following him since he wrote for Ars (and he's also on HN sometimes), so I can tell he certainly has drunk some Kool-aid, and it has a slight Google flavor. He interned there after all, so that may explain why Microsoft was highlighted in the headlines.

But notably, he also is (or was) a "scholar" at the Cato Institute, which believes in "limited government and free markets" and seems to have anti-IP leanings. Unsurprisingly the author's articles (even this one!) often uncritically cite the works published by academics like James Bessen, which like to paint a "sky is falling" situation with respect to US IP policies, even though these works have time and again been strongly called into question by other academics. Given that he's a scholar himself, I'd be surprised if he's unaware of that, but his articles only ever present one side.

So the Kool-aid may have other, stronger flavors as well, but he's definitely drunk some.

I find having the list in full is great, because they need to be named and shamed, too. Each and every one of them deserves a negative business impact for signing it.

Obviously from their perspective they'd have a greater negative business impact from not signing it.

only if the company incorrectly assume that their signing will be overlooked by most of their customers.

If a big fuss was made about such problems, they might chagne their tune.

Maybe it's you incorrectly assuming whatever TFA says is true. Or that most of their customers would hold the same viewpoint as you.

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