then the reaction isn’t too surprising. It’s like the push-poll that you cited: the question asked, the /framing/ of debate matters.

SO Big Media needs to re-frame it as anti-piracy.

Then the numbers would come out against “piracy”, right? After all, even Pirate Mike SAYS that he’s against piracy…

The German novelist Hans Helmut Kirst, writing about the July 20, 1944 conspiracy by elements of the German army to overthrow Hitler, observed that the conspiracy was really a series of little conspiracies, all trying to find each other in the limited time available, under conditions of strict secrecy. Of course, the conspirators failed to link up in time, and the result was a massacre of the closet anti-nazis. This is, I think, an instructive analogy.

Organizations such as Demand Progress are building up e-mailing lists, and these lists include postal ZIP code. ZIP codes are good enough to identify congressional districts, which means that the organization can keep track of the date of the primary election in various states, not to mention special elections, and send out an e-mail to the people who have the opportunity to vote against someone like Rep. Bob Goodlatte. Equally important are the URL’s in millions of bookmark files.

Attendance at a primary election, especially in an off-year such as 2010, is generally pretty low, because most of the candidates for a given nomination agree with each other on most points, and specifically on the points with which ninety percent of voters are concerned with, that is taxes, health care, unemployment, immigration, etc. A comparatively small number of people deciding to turn up for the primary on account of a side-issue, such as copyright, can be enough to swing a primary election in favor of a challenger who agrees with the incumbent about the aforesaid basic issues, but differs about the side-issue. Once the bidding is spelled out, an organized group can effectively demand accommodation on a side-issue. The National Rifle Association, for example, has long established a “don’t tread on me” rule.

This whole structure of organization against the excesses of copyright is accumulating. The mailing lists grow longer and more complete. Each time there is a new threat, the mailing lists start from a higher baseline, and increase a bit. The movie and music industries cannot really compete with us. Astroturfing doesn’t work as far as the ballot box. The movie and music industries don’t employ very many people– nothing remotely comparable to the automobile industry or the public schools, for example. Most of these employees are concentrated in a few states and congressional districts. We have reached a point where the number of people who have received legal threats from the movie and music industries is approaching the number of people employed by these industries. Probably the most effective core of opposition to the movie and music industries are parents who are afraid that they might lose their houses because their twelve-year-old daughters have downloaded songs.

Furthermore, a disproportionate number of music industry “fanboys” are underage. They are fixated on the idea that their neighborhood “kid band” will suddenly make them rich– which is about as likely as winning the state lottery. Being underage, the fanboys cannot vote. By the time they are old enough to vote, they are likely to become economic realists, concerned with passing a civil-service exam or something like that. In the real world, you don’t wait to be “discovered” by a talent scout. You earn a college degree, or pass a civil service exam, or whatever, to get a better job.

By the way, I’ll save “Bob” (#1, 18, 21, 25, 32, 45, 48, et. seq.) a question. I really don’t listen to music much, because I can’t concentrate properly on my reading or writing or programming when music is playing. My clock radio, tuned to the local public radio station, wakes me up in the morning, and that’s about it. Classical music is not public-domain per se, but the underlying scores are, and so many people have produced recordings of their own performances that the recordings are not really scarce goods. They turn up at public library rummage sales all the time. You have to know really a lot about music to be able to make the fine distinctions between one symphony orchestra interpretation of a particular work, and another orchestra’s interpretation. That seems to apply with even more force, now that Classical MIDI has come along. Classical MIDI operates in a de-facto “free” regime, and I simply haven’t a good enough ear to be discontented with its shortcomings, real or imagined.

My one big expenditure on music in the last twenty years was, paradoxically, on anti-music. I had a noisy apartment neighbor, who insisted on playing his stereo full blast, playing the kind of punk kid’s music that “Bob” thinks everyone has to listen to, and it was difficult to do anything about it in the short term. So I spent a couple of hundred dollars on a pair of noise-canceling headphones. They didn’t work very well, because they were designed to cancel jet-engine noise, rather than rock-star-drum noise. This was some years ago, of course, when a couple of hundred dollars only bought a LC filter, or maybe a phase-lock-loop. The filter locked onto the dominant _continuous_ noise, the air conditioner motor and fan, and filtered that out quite nicely. There may be a market for a modernized version. One could use a micro controller, perhaps, and cancel out episodic sounds in the 50 HZ range (a wavelength of twenty feet), those which are not disrupted by internal reflection and interference when passing through a wall. If you take a noise at 500 Hz, and assume the wall to be six inches thick, a portion of the signal gets reflected back to the originating surface, and reflected back again, getting a foot out of phase, and that’s half a wavelength, or complete cancellation.

However, in this case over one million emails were sent (and unlike Creative America, users were able to edit the emails to add their own thoughts) in just one day

SO ?

Many of that million will be the same people spamming them, and most if not ALL of them will be ignored.

Do you understand that politicians take almost NO notice of emailed complaints, its just too easy to do.

A written and posted letter carries about 10 times the weight to a poly than an email does, and a written letter carries almost no weight unless it is followed up by phone and an appointment to see that person.

1 million from a population of 350,000,000 is 0.285% of the population.

So when a politician gets an email from:

chunkylover53@aol.com

are they going to pay it much attention?

I dont think so they wont even see it, they probaby all get marked as spam and are filtered out.