As someone who is in DC doing net neutrality advocacy on a daily basis, I love this question. One of our major challenges is that ISPs have data on their networks and we don't. That leaves us in a position to speculate about what is "really" happening and hoping that someone out there happens to have the technical skills to potentially uncover a problem. The HN community's ability to evaluate claims made by ISPs as legitimate or illegitimate based on technical constraints is incredibly valuable.
Non-quality of code question, and sorry I haven't been able to parse this from the comments so far. Am I reading this correctly to mean that Comcast's method of alerting customers that they are close to their cap drives them closer to their cap?
Hi - I work at Public Knowledge and coordinated our exemption request. While our exemption request was specifically about DVDs, the Copyright Office's rejection was much broader. Essentially, the Copyright Office found no evidence that space shifting as a practice was fair use. That means that, as far as the Copyright Office is concerned, space shifters are infringing on copyright. That would include anyone who copied a work from one medium to another - regardless of whether or not it was protected by DRM.
The key is to mobilize people in a way that makes an impact without going to the well too often. In the case of this proceeding, we knew that the Copyright Office does not necessarily respond to numbers of people simply saying "do this do this." When we put out a call, we asked for (and received) specific stories from people explaining why they themselves wanted this exemption.
That is very different from the kind of action you want to take when Congress is considering something. As I mentioned before, the next step in this process is to push Congress to make it absolutely crystal clear to everyone - including the Copyright Office - that non-commercial personal copies of media are well within the bounds of fair use. We need to wait until after the election and the new Congress is in session next year, but once that happens we are going to be making a big push to get just that type of legislation. At that point I hope that you will rally around the push. Unlike the Copyright Office, Congress tends to be much more responsive to numbers of people simply telling them to act.
re: 1. I work at Public Knowledge, the group that requested the general DVD ripping exception. We did organize a campaign around our exemption request and included the response in our reply comments. Going forward, our plan is to push Congress to pass laws that make it explicitly clear that "space shifting" is fair use. Of course, for that we will need the help of a broad coalition of people, including here at HN.