re: 1. I work at Public Knowledge, the group that requested the general DVD ripping exception. We did organize a campaign around our exemption request and included the response in our reply comments. Going forward, our plan is to push Congress to pass laws that make it explicitly clear that "space shifting" is fair use. Of course, for that we will need the help of a broad coalition of people, including here at HN.
When I was typing out 1. I was thinking of the response that SOPA got. It seemed like it mobilised people to make phone calls and send emails. I think that had an impact. I'm just guessing here. In any case, it would be very interesting to see how LOC would respond to a surge in constituent participation in the DMCA exception process.
So, you make that sound hypothetical, but if you look, the EFF actually did something like that for the tablet and video game console exemptions: the number of comments filed this year was thereby staggering (sufficiently many that they missed their deadline on publishing them and had to simply put up an apology for a few days as they continued to go through it all).
I have no idea whether many or even any of these individual comments were thereby read: many were from people not even in the US, many were difficult to understand in broken English... some were blank, and one was actually "the wrong PDF" (someone's University parking pass). Before seeing the pile that was sent in, I had made it my goal this year to read everything published, but when I got through the C's I just couldn't do it anymore and stopped.
They seem to have responded to it quite well, in that it wasn't a major issue in either direction: I didn't hear anything (although I was fairly disconnected and only indirectly getting information, so I might just not know) of any complaints; it didn't seem to help, however (in that neither of those exemptions were accepted).
"that they missed their deadline" <- For the belated record, when I said "they" in this phrase I meant "the copyright office" (not the EFF, for example).
The key is to mobilize people in a way that makes an impact without going to the well too often. In the case of this proceeding, we knew that the Copyright Office does not necessarily respond to numbers of people simply saying "do this do this." When we put out a call, we asked for (and received) specific stories from people explaining why they themselves wanted this exemption.
That is very different from the kind of action you want to take when Congress is considering something. As I mentioned before, the next step in this process is to push Congress to make it absolutely crystal clear to everyone - including the Copyright Office - that non-commercial personal copies of media are well within the bounds of fair use. We need to wait until after the election and the new Congress is in session next year, but once that happens we are going to be making a big push to get just that type of legislation. At that point I hope that you will rally around the push. Unlike the Copyright Office, Congress tends to be much more responsive to numbers of people simply telling them to act.
This sounds like interesting work. Indeed I think those submitting requests need to thnk carefully about how to make compelling arguments. I'm thankful for the work you and your team are doing. saurik: As I asked "Am I missing something here?", the answer is of course "I am", but I continue to learn. I'm glad to hear you're getting involved with this.
