Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Tell Your Lawmakers: "Anti-Counterfeiting" Treaty Is a Sham (eff.org)
57 points by chaostheory on June 2, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments


Do form letters like this actually work? I see these types of things all the time, usually in a "Corporation X wants our lawmakers to pass Bill Y, and it's bad for people!" context.

Doesn't the EFF have lobbyists? I think history has shown enough times that lobby money is far more powerful than anything that's good for the citizens.


Form letters are, essentially, "half-read once and then weighed weekly to produce a report for $POLITICIAN", according to my brother, who used to be in constituent services.

Themes which come up frequently in non-form phone calls and letters, on the other hand, have a surprising amount of impact. The Republicans, for example, got a huge amount of negative feedback regarding immigration policy during the last election cycle, and more than one politician mentioned the depth and intensity of that (not always in a positive way) in signaling changes in their stance on it.

P.S. If you ever have a severe problem with the government and don't know where to turn, document everything, then call your Congressman's office.


I will do that when the EFF stops suing people for violating the GNU and requiring them to:

1) open up all their source 2) hire a "compliance" officer to make sure they aren't violating the GNU license in the future.

More info about this can be found here: http://gpl-violations.org/

With all their talk about freedom, it sure sounds like they are just as restricting as the RIAA/MPAA


GNU is an operating system. I believe that you're reaching for the GPL. Also, the EFF is not suing people; gpl-violations.org is. To the best of my knowledge (and Wikipedia's), they aren't associated. Perhaps you could explain the connection between the two?


"GNU is an operating system."

It's pretty easy to confuse the two when you slap GNU in front of everything (including operating systems and licenses). Stallman even tried rename Linux a few years back to: GNU/linux

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

"the EFF is not suing people; gpl-violations.org"

you're right, I meant the FSF, which convinces many people to assign them the copyrights of their apps and then sues violators in court.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: