Million E-mail March

bmongar writes: " CNN is running a story on MP3.com planning a million e-mail march to back legislation to make it legal to keep digital copies of your music." Maybe I'm just a skeptic, but I can't imagine this actually working. How many legislators read their own mail? Lick a stamp and mail an actual letter. It's harder to ignore. All this will do is knock down mail servers (you just know some jerk is gonna write a script and spam the hell out of them).

Comments

Use Paypal to lobby?

[askheaves]

What if 1 million people sent an email connected with a $1.00 donation using paypal? Can a million dollars be ignored? Pretty nice lobby, if you ask me.

It's alot more effective than you would think

[Earthling]

Sorry, but that idea won't accomplish a thing. Congressional staffers don't have much regard for e-mail

While not as effective as a good-old hand written letter, email is alot more effective than you seem to believe. Email has become the method of choice, replacing telegrams (I'm not kidding) for telling politicians what people think. It would be foolish to believe that your representative actually reads the emails he receive (or the letters for that matter), but his or her staffers will read, count and catalog them, and them report what's going on to their boss. And they pay heed to that.

-Earthling

From a Former Congressional Intern...

[FleaPlus]

Hey all.

I volunteered as a congressional intern my junior year in high school. If I remember correctly, one of my tasks was to read through e-mails sent in, summarize them in a couple of sentences, and forward that to the congressman's Washington office. I would then file the original in a large cabinet, in case it was ever needed in the future.

Essentially, while a congressman/woman won't read each and every individual e-mail sent in, s/he will get the general idea. If a great number of constituents are concerned about an issue, a congressman -will- care.

Obvious choice

[Icebox]

Have they checked into partnering with Microsoft on this project?

Regrettably, snail mail is probably best...

[Lancer]

All I've read and heard about having an impact on legislators tells me that snail mail is most effective, then comes telephones, and only then e-mail. It's far too easy to ignore e-mail, but bags of letters (which imply more effort on the sender's part) make a statement.

My $.02...

Completely ineffective...

[WombatControl]

Sorry, but that idea won't accomplish a thing. Congressional staffers don't have much regard for e-mail, as anyone can send it without much work or thought.

If you wanted to send a real message, send a good-old fashioned snail mail message. From experience, nothing's more intimidating than seeing a very unusually large stack of letters from your constituents in your offices. A full mail box just doesn't have the same effect.

That being said, the idea is really a good one, just the methods are not the most effective.

Be a part of the "Million E-Mail March!"

[Misch]

Of course, MP3.com is involved in this... go here and write a letter to your representative and senators...

Spam mp3.com instead.

[rkent]

Hrmph. Maybe we should just send a million emails to mp3.com instead, telling them how stupid this campaign is and urging them to start a real letter writing campaign instead.

Come to think of it, why do we need a corporate sponsor for this? Let's just start the real letter writing petition. I'm sure slashdot readers can generate 10s of thousands of letters, anyway, if not a million.

Dishonest summary

[Sloppy]

bmongar wrote:

...to back legislation to make it legal to keep digital copies of your music.

And CNN wrote:

The bill would amend federal copyright laws to make it legal to create a digital copy of a recording, known as an MP3 file...

These are very poor and misleading summaries. It is already legal to make digital copies of stuff that you own.

What mp3.com really wants is to make it legal to transmit a song to someone who has proved that they already own it. i.e. they want to legalize a royaltyless my.mp3.com service.

These overly-simple summaries are dishonest, IMHO, because they make it look like the new legislation would grant some very basic consumer rights that we don't already have, when in fact, it would really just grant a very subtle right that mp3.com's business model wants.

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Music Owners' Listening Rights Act of 2000

[monkeydo]

I case anyone actually cares what the bill says, it states that you aren't violating a copyright if you make copies for the purpose of providing "personal interactive performance" The bill then defines "personal interactive performance"

"As used in this section, the term "personal interactive performance" means the performance of a sound recording and the non-dramatic musical works embodied therein by means of a digital transmission and includes any digital phonorecord deliveries associated with such transmission, provided that the transmission is received only by a recipient who has provided to the transmitting organization proof that the recipient lawfully possesses a phonorecord of such sound recording and who has conveyed to the transmitting organization a specific request to receive the transmission of the performance."

Ther is nothing in this defenition, or elsewhere in the bill that says the user can't record the stream (although it doesn't protect it either). It also dosen't define what constitutes "proof that the recipient lawfully possesses a phonorecord of such sound recording."

Certainly though MP3.com's current method is insufficient since it only demonstrates momentary possesion.

Is there anyone here that really belives no one played their friends CDs from MP3.com?

Type it, don't email, but fax is ok

[John Jorsett]

I agree with the posters that typing a letter on a piece of paper is better in terms of impact. However, you can go ahead fax the result and still get their attention. Seeing the fax machine melt down is just as effective as bags of mail (faster and cheaper delivery too, and the sudden onslaught can make it look like a revolt is in progress). Phone calls to the office are also a good way to get a legislator's staff to tell him/her "hey, people are worked up about this."

I have some personal experience with this. A friend of mine is in PR and she had a client who wanted to really call attention to a local city issue. By recruiting as few as 100 people to write letters, call, and fax, she got the entire city council buzzing about the sudden citizen uprising. You need a surprisingly small number of people to leverage your issue to the top of the agenda.

This may actually have some effect

[karzan]

I know several people who have done a lot of work in offices of political figures and can say that there are people who sit around going through every letter and probably every email sent to them. The way it works is they have a spreadsheet with all the "issues" listed, and for each issue that keep a tally of the opinions received.

Of course, totally aside from that, the flood of email is going to bring down mail servers and piss people off, which may have the opposite of the desired effect.

Unrelated to that, I find this quote from the article a little strange:

The My.Mp3.com service differs from the music-sharing Web site Napster, which faces legal challenges of its own, because it merely sends the music to listening devices, such as a computer or a wireless music player. Napster lets users download an actual computer file and make copies of it.

Now everyone knows if mp3.com sends music to a "listening device" that happens to be your computer, you can save it in a file just as easily as you can with Napster. I find it interesting how the article attempts to make mp3.com look like it's less of a copyright violator than Napster, when in fact Napster is not even violating any copyrights outright and mp3.com is! Perhaps this is an attempt to dissociate mp3.com with the "infamous" Napster...

Re:CueCat?

[Misch]

Scan the UPC on the CD and send it to a site, say MP3.com which just happens to have a giant database of MP3's on hand

That's a good idea, but what do you do about tiny companies who don't have a UPC to use? And, as :CueCat and the modern retailing industry have shown, UPC's are terribly easy and cheap to make. CD's, however, to burn an excat copy is much much harder. (You need to copy the CD's ID number & track information exactly to use My.mp3.com. This was fairly difficult from what I've heard.)

Having a real CD in hand implies that at least one person got a hold of a real CD.

Legislators reading email

[dr_eaerth]

Maybe I'm just a skeptic, but I can't imagine this actually working. How many legislators read their own mail?

None. For example, take Senator Murkowski from Alaska, the senator responsible for the failed pro-spam bill you'll find quoted at the bottom of much of your spam (this is called being "murked"). Not suprisingly, he got lots of complaints about the bill.

The senator got sick of the outcry against his awful attempt at legislation. Now every single email to him goes into the bitbucket, not even read by staff.

Do you think any other legislators would react differently to complaints about their incompetence? Send them a million emails, and even if they read their email now, they won't any longer.
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