Politicians

Recently, Boing Boing and Copy Crime have been telling people about the upcoming Proposed directive on criminal measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of intellectual property right and its obvious flaws. They suggested to write to your MEP telling them what you thought with the hopes that the public pressure would move them to accept the amendments proposed by the FFII and a coalition of libraries, consumers and innovators. So that’s what I did, not really hoping to get a response.

Dear sir,

My name is Hermann Kaser and I am a university student and web developer from Derby.

I’ve been reading about the proposed Directive on Criminal Measures and the amendments proposed by the group representing librarians, consumers, and innovators. As a consumer, innovator and obsessive reader I believe the amendments minimise the damage caused by the extremely aggressive original proposal.

The original proposal seems a sort of blanket regulation aimed at ‘killing anything that moves’ rather than focusing on the real problems: true criminal enterprises aimed at profiting from copyright piracy and trademark violation. It also puts intermediaries who have nothing to do with the whole deal on the line, an appropriate analogy would be to accuse road companies of aiding criminals because they used their roads to get to and from a crime scene.

I don’t agree with Directive of Criminal Measures at all, I think it’s all kinds of wrong, but I see the point of it and I believe that supporting the amendments proposed by the Librarians’, Consumers’, and Innovators’ Coalition is the step forward.

I hope you consider this when you vote on the amendments to IPRED2 on April 25th, criminalising just about everyone on the internet is not the way forward.

Regards,
Hermann Kaser
http://www.theragingche.com/

From This list I sent it to Roger Helmer, Bill Newton Dunn, and Glennis Willmott because they were the only ones with a listed email on their profile page.

As I expected I got what seemed liked a canned response from Glennis Willmot asking for my postal address.

Thank you for your email. I would be grateful if you would let us have your
postal address. Glenis will then respond as soon as possible.

But what I didn’t expect was to get a real response.

I broadly agree with you.
Bill Newton Dunn

I mean, technically it could be a canned response, and a very clever one at that, but I’ll never know will I? Besides Glennis’ automated response was received a minute after I sent it out, Bill’s took 34 minutes. He could have set his auto responders to answer after a random amount of time but that seems excessively contrived, Occam’s Razor says he answered in person. :-)