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.

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.

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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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...