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When I posted this page last week with an "email your reps" form, a lot of people commented to say that calling your representatives is much more effective than
by sinak 13y ago
When I posted this page last week with an "email your reps" form, a lot of people commented to say that calling your representatives is much more effective than emailing.
So I scrambled around, and was eventually introduced to the folks at Call2Action, who've built a Twilio integration that makes calling really easy. It took a couple of all-nighters (mostly because I redesigned the entire site), but the page now has a number that you can dial that'll request your zip code and then connect you to talk to your representatives.
At the moment, the leading bill in Congress on this issue is the "Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act." That bill is proposed by the heads of the judiciary committee. It does absolutely nothing to correct the problems with Section 1201 of the DMCA; instead it simply reverses the Librarian of Congress's removal of the unlocking exemption. The problem is that those exemptions only cover personal acts of circumvention, and not the tools and services needed to make it happen. I'd be willing to bet that even here on HN, very few of us have the skills to unlock a smartphone from scratch. For unlocking software to exist, it needs to be feasible for developers to invest time in building those tools.
The "Unlocking Technology Act" would not only make tools and services legal, but would amend the DMCA to make circumvention of "technological protection measures" legal as long as the purpose isn't piracy. That'd cover unlocking, jailbreaking, modding game consoles, but also it'd enable removing DRM for "fair use." For example, it'd make it significantly easier for documentary filmmakers, teachers, archivists and remix artists to access content for use in the course of there day to day work. And it would prevent security researchers from being threatened under the DMCA when they try and publish research about DRM.
This has become a bit of a personal project for me while I'm between startups, and I'd really appreciate you taking the time to support it.
tl;dr Please take a few minutes today and call - this bill deserves our support.
- tocomment 13y agoThat's really cool how you got the phone stuff working! What do you instead about having the user enter their own phone number and zip code on the site and click submit. Then twilio calls the rep and the user? That way the user doesn't have to even dial.
- awwstn 13y agoI'm not totally sure, but I think it's helpful if the call comes from a local area code. But, many of us have legacy area codes from places we lived 10-15 years ago, so it may not matter too much.
- chimeracoder 13y agoRelevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1129/ http://xkcd.com/1129/ In all seriousness, though, calling from a local area code does make a huge difference. If you don't have a local phone number for some reason (recently moved, etc.), then you can still call and identify yourself by name and say that you're a constituent (note: say "constituent", not "voter").
- Natsu 13y agoI got one actual person out of my three reps, the other two dumping me to a voicemail that said only "that mailbox is full."
- corywright 13y agoBeing able to call one number, enter zip, and press * was fantastic. I actually got to speak to three humans in the offices of my VA representative and senators. All took down my information, and even asked me to repeat which bill I was calling about just to be sure. Great experience.