Dkhanna11

Good question, I touch on this in my Boing Boing piece. To many people in DC it's a simple situation, piracy = bad, copyright protection = good. But of course it's much more complicated that that. I personally support copyright, but until you disentangle this thought process to a more rational one based upon what works and what doesn't we will be in trouble

Something that people should consider, I don't think that people focus enough on twitter campaigns targeted at members of Congress - I've been very interested in this. But if new people tweet their member of congress on a regular basis about something they havent' taken a stand on - like cellphone unlocking - then they are likely to have an internal discussion in the office on where they are - this discussion is what we need for politics to work.

So I encourage people to do that.

A good place to start is with the cellphone unlocking issue, I don't think that the content industry can argue that you are "soft on piracy" because you support property rights for cellphone owners.

SOPA was pretty simple really - most Members don't understand technology or care about technology - and the biggest baddest interest group says that they have a solution that will save American jobs and defend IP, and people are like umm ok, cool! I was in meetings like this, and when I started to argue on the DNS etc. people just rolled their eyes because then it became complicated -- well, sometimes these things are complicated. When you are talking about a DNS level censorship regime it's pretty damn complicated.

Unfortunately, most Hill staffers do so many different issues it's almost impossible for them to have anything close to "expertise" on any of them - I'm not disparaging them many work very hard and most would admit this themselves.

So as a result, staffers often rely upon lobbyists who are seen by most as industry experts. Sometimes these lobbyists have decades of experience in an industry and really do know their stuff - often times they do not however. But either way, they are not trying to present the facts, they are presenting their facts. I always realized that this should be taken with a grain of salt. But in answer to your question, they are VERY involved.