Re: [dvd-discuss] Going on the offense.

[Bryan Taylor <bryan_w_taylor(at)yahoo.com>]

--- Kurt Hockenbury <khockenb@stevens-tech.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Sep 2001, Ravi Nanavati wrote:
> 
> > The Felten case notwithstanding, the thing that makes our legal battle
> > harder is that we are almost always playing "defense" not "offense".
> 
> I was discussing that with a co-worker over lunch.  Why don't we start
> going on the offensive, rather than play defense all the time?  Why not try
> and get some laws supporting our view point passed?

The best method for doing this is in states that have ballot propositions. In
some states, you can completely circumvent the legislature. California has a
good system for this. Texas has it, but you have to have the legislature put it
on the ballot. Anybody know about other states?

The problem with trying to do this in the Copyright arena is that there is no
Federal ballot proposition system, and federal copyright law preempts state
law. Creating federal ballot propositions would probably take an amendment to
the Constitution, but I think that would be a good thing.

I think an anti-clickwrap, pro-reverse engineering proposition would be easy to
get on the ballot and would probably win and hold up. Since these issues are
state contract matters, this type of thing might hold up.

Besides something like that, we've basically got to go into the lobbying
business if we want to change federal law. This shouldn't be the case, but it
IS he case and it isn't likely to change soon.

I actually think that the *potential* is there for the tech community to be
VERY affective at lobbying, basically because we have our own communication
channels, and we're generally moderately affluent. We need to turn the EFF from
just a litigation organization into a lobbying organization.

The next phase of this contest should be aimed at identifying the good guys and
the bad guys. Negative issue based publicity naming names is pretty effective,
especially in grass roots situations. We need to make sure that as many people
as possible know that Senators Hollings and Stevens are sponsoring a fascist
bill aimed at the government wresting control of your PC away from you and
handing it to big media. 

Other bad guys are Coble and Feinstein. The only good guy I've identified is
Boucher.




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