I was on a conference call w/ Zoe Lofgren (CA congress woman who is on the Judiciary fighting the hell out of this bill) and a bunch of NYC tech companies last weekend and she said petitions are essentially ignored, and instead to make phone calls to your reps and directly into the capital.
This isn't to say don't sign this, but if you are really concerned, the absolute bottom line is phone calls. Anything you can do to funnel phone calls in is what counts.
Be sure to read the petition -- unlike most of them, it's actually smart political commentary: It mocks SOPA by having whitehouse.gov itself link to a website that's infringing copyright. The joke is that whitehouse.gov could itself be removed from the DNS system under SOPA.
This is the first use of the White House petitioning system that I think is actually really clever. (Honorable mention: Petition to Please Take Petitions Seriously.)
Polis is actually "one of us" -- he made a good amount of money doing startups. He opposes SOPA. In this case, call him up and send him some love for doing the right thing.
He's a pretty awesome guy -- check him out here entering the lyrics to "The Internet is for Porn" from Avenue Q into the congressional record: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owyNvlVJ1qE
While that's quite funny, it bothers me that he seems to be arguing for SOPA to effectively not cover porn. Why is it that the intellectual property rights of pornographers should not be protected? Why are their rights not as important as the rights of others?
> It was a brilliant tactical maneuver. First, it delayed discussions while members of the august Judiciary committee wrangled with how to handle this unusual conversational detour. Second, it put SOPA-supporting chairman Lamar Smith, a conservative Republican whose district is largely Texas Hill Country, on the defensive by appearing to show him siding with the intellectual-property rights of people who create triple-X movies.
> Third--and this may have been the point of the entire exercise--it gave Polis an excuse to insert the full lyrics of the popular Internet meme "The Internet is for Porn" into the official congressional hearing record for SOPA. (Representative excerpt: "All these guys unzip their flies / For porn, porn, porn!")
> Because the amendment goes further than obscenity and encompasses "pornography," it could have imperiled the remainder of SOPA. U.S. courts have ruled that pornography is not a legal term of art and is presumptively protected by the First Amendment.
> Polis' amendment, in other words, could doom SOPA on constitutional grounds: which "R" rated movies would be pornographic? How about Maxim? Explicit rap lyrics? More to the point, which MPAA and RIAA member companies might have to worry about their products being deemed "pornographic?"
If Congress can be bought, why not expose the people doing the buying, and their lobbyists, and exert pressure on them instead of writing or calling Congressmen who don't care?
They wouldn't be trying to buy this sort of legislation if they didn't think it was, in balance, in their commercial interests. They've likely already modelled the effect of any consumer backlash in their analysis, so why would they listen to you? They were expecting to lose you anyway.
By "people" I refer to the human beings who run the corporations, not the corporations themselves. I doubt very much that executives behind these moves at corporations have taken being held responsible personally into account. In my opinion, they should be held accountable personally, not only by shareholders, but by society at large.
I believe that corporate executives act with impunity because society, as a whole, has come to consider corporations as people (beyond the legal fiction of Personhood). Executives hide behind this "personhood". Why should we stop at: "BigCo is doing something evil", when the individual board members and executives of BigCo are ultimately the ones who make the decisions?
Zuckerberg, and in an earlier era, Gates, are examples of two CEOs who are held personally liable in the court of public opinion for the misdeeds of their corporations. In my opinion, more of that would be healthy.
Because the bribery is done completely in the open and legally. You get campaign contributions or a cushy contractor position worth millions to you personally. It's not illegal so "exposing" the companies engaging in this behavior won't have much effect on them.
Not the companies. Their corporate officers. A few pickets outside a (morally) corrupt CEOs home, or his country club might make him more careful about future business decisions. As it stands corporations are a useful shield for the sometimes reprehensible actions of the human beings who run them.
Since bribes, as in payment for specific acts, has been illegal in the US for some time now, each donor can hide behind the excuse that they only donated to the candidate, but they don't support them for this particular issue.
I understand the present day practical reason why she thinks that phone calls matter more, I really do, however phone calls are a time inefficient way of accomplishing that result. There are just so many things people could be doing with their lives, including communicating opinion about other political issues, that we should allow all of them to be done as efficiently as possible. An online petition is more efficient. The key is trust. What we really need is some sort of highly automatable, electronic way of voting or expressing political positions in a way that is trustable. We shouldn't not trust some expression of political intent merely because it's fast/efficient, that's almost ridiculous, instead we should only not trust it if it is forged or shilled.
> that we should allow all of them to be done as efficiently as possible
Efficiency is the enemy for things like this, because it only shows a minimum amount of involvement with the issue. You show you care at all by participating in petitions, but you prove you care more by participating in more time-intensive activities.
This is something that you'll see people close to politicians say quite a lot, that the method of communication counts, and a multiplier is used to count your input based on that method. It's why you're supposed to write to your $political_representative on paper rather that firing off an email, and it's why you're supposed to hand write the letter (legibly, please!) rather than typing it. A person who takes an hour or two drafting a compelling response to legislation, writing a final copy by hand, taking it to the post office, affixing a stamp, and mailing it out has shown more concern for the issue than does a guy who goes on HN, sees this link, and fills out a form to effectively just say "yeah, me too, what he said!"
I understood that. It's that there are 1000 other things we need to be doing as humans. plus, I think there are more substantive and focused ways of showing somebody understands a given topic area, spent time on it, and has a meritocratic opinion worth paying attention to it. People who write letters to an editor may show they're passionate about an issue. But is also shows their time has little value, and/or they are an ignorant quack. We need to be able to make a distinction between these cases. And at the same time make it as easy and fast and cheap and painless as possible to vote.
And on November 8th, going into a voting booth, that is all that anyone can do already. Just push a button or fill in a circle which indicates "yeah, me too!". For those cases, let's speed it up and scale it up.
Effectiveness is inversely proportional to efficiency. Phone calls matter more because Congresspeople only have so much time, too, you know? Did you think that anybody ever reads all eight zillion emails sent in about the legality of selling horse meat?
And this is exactly the issue. If this issue isn't important enough for you to invest some of your time to make your opinion known on the subject, then you're probably not going to change your vote on it anyway.
Please don't reply with "this". It's a kind of lazy shorthand that doesn't add anything and lowers the overall level of conversation, so you'll be downvoted for it.
This isn't to say don't sign this, but if you are really concerned, the absolute bottom line is phone calls. Anything you can do to funnel phone calls in is what counts.
Edit: Let me add this, which makes it absurdly easy: http://fightforthefuture.org/