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.

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...