I'm in the UK as well, and have similar worries. My own MP (Julian Huppert in Cambridge) seems to be fairly clued up about these technical/IP issues, but I fear he is in a small minority within Parliament as a whole.
There is a certain kind of person -- I'm still not sure whether it's in the political classes or whether it's an ingrained assumption/bias at the top of the civil service -- who keeps supporting harsh IP-related laws. I don't assume that they're doing it out of malice. I think there are good arguments for having a robust IP framework, at least until someone demonstrates anything more effective at promoting creation and distribution of new works.
But at the same time, as a practical matter, there is inevitably a balance to be struck between enforcing someone's IP rights and protecting someone else's rights of privacy, freedom of expression, and so on. I get the feeling that a lot of the briefings used to persuade representatives to vote for these draconian laws aren't paying much attention to the costs in these areas, only to the assumed economic benefits of having a strong IP regime in place. At least if the problem is ignorance rather than malice/corruption, one possible solution is education, and thus I write to my representatives in the hope that at least some of them will listen.
FWIW, I had about a 50% response rate to a letter to 7 MEPs on this subject, although I don't think I should count the one whose letter basically repeated each of my points verbatim but with the words "I understand that..." at the start of each sentence!
> FWIW, I had about a 50% response rate to a letter to 7 MEPs on this subject, although I don't think I should count the one whose letter basically repeated each of my points verbatim but with the words "I understand that..." at the start of each sentence!
Well, technically 5/7 replied, but two were little better than auto-reply e-mails mumbling something about sending a reply later (which never came in either case) so I discounted those to leave 3/7 and called it around 50%.
One of those was the utterly vacuous letter I mentioned, so I think I should discount that one as well.
So really, I got only two substantive replies (for the record, one was from a Lib Dem and the other from a UKIP MEP) that genuinely addressed the issue I'd brought up and explained their position.
There is a certain kind of person -- I'm still not sure whether it's in the political classes or whether it's an ingrained assumption/bias at the top of the civil service -- who keeps supporting harsh IP-related laws. I don't assume that they're doing it out of malice. I think there are good arguments for having a robust IP framework, at least until someone demonstrates anything more effective at promoting creation and distribution of new works.
But at the same time, as a practical matter, there is inevitably a balance to be struck between enforcing someone's IP rights and protecting someone else's rights of privacy, freedom of expression, and so on. I get the feeling that a lot of the briefings used to persuade representatives to vote for these draconian laws aren't paying much attention to the costs in these areas, only to the assumed economic benefits of having a strong IP regime in place. At least if the problem is ignorance rather than malice/corruption, one possible solution is education, and thus I write to my representatives in the hope that at least some of them will listen.
FWIW, I had about a 50% response rate to a letter to 7 MEPs on this subject, although I don't think I should count the one whose letter basically repeated each of my points verbatim but with the words "I understand that..." at the start of each sentence!