The hated Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it a crime to tell people how to get around the locks on digital works. This indiscriminate legislation means that all kinds of public-interest reverse-engineering is off-limits to the public — for example, hacking open the list of banned sites in censorware packages that are mandated for use in public libraries, in order to determine whether our tax-dollars are being wisely spent.
The US Copyright Office is holding its third set of hearings on anticircumvention exceptions. This is something you — and everyone you know — can participate in, submitting written petitions for exemptions for personal backup; for fair use remixing, criticism, and education; for providing assistive information to disabled people, etc.
EFF Pioneer Award Winner Seth Finkelstein has written a citizen's guide to petitioning the Copyright Office on this subject, which you can read here.
There's a common view of technical people, that participation in government falls somewhere between functionally useless and morally perverse. It's easy to deride the clueless congresscreatures, and take comfort in an idea of building an uncensorable realm located in some other dimension. And it's not encouraging to be one letter in a pile of mail to a Senator, or a few dollars versus the economic clout of copyright industries. But not all aspects of influencing government are so one-sided and unbalanced.
To begin with, making a submission in this DMCA rulemaking process is comparatively easy. Whatever gains are made, are won at a trivially small cost. This is a matter of drafting a letter, with some thought and detail. It's not a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign. It's not a lawsuit which drains someone's life. It's not anyone going to jail. Rather, it's essentially drafting a letter, the same commitment as happens every single day on so many mailing-lists and weblogs.
But unlike letters to congressional offices, these public comments are truly read by the people who make the policy. That is in fact one of the most astonishing aspects visible in the text of the earlier rulemaking results. The policy-maker may not have agreed with the arguments, may in fact have dismissed them; but there's enough referencing and mention of the reasons for the results so as to make it clear that the viewpoints of the public were heard. And this consideration doesn't even require a large bribe, I mean, campaign contribution. Not all parts of the government are equally inaccessible. It turns out these policy-making determinations are surprisingly amenable to informed citizens making a difference.
(Thanks, Seth!)
