This is as good of a response as you can expect. This is a win. If you expected anything else (sneak, I'm looking at you here too) then you've never received a response from the White House on an issue on which they truly disagree. That letter would have said something like "While we respect your opinion, we believe that the current law best satisfies the needs of blah blah blah."

Here, they are saying: yeah. We agree with you. We don't write the damn laws- but here is what we're willing to sign.

Our job is to get our Senators and Representatives to change the law.

It may not be pretty, and it's certainly not efficient, but this is democracy in action. It requires effort from its citizens in order to work. Not running away.

EDIT: I forgot to add, that I did receive a 'blow it out your ass' response from President Clinton many years ago. He later reversed his stance on the issue, but it was too late for him to affect it and just left it as a recommendation to the next pres- who ignored it.

Based on what you're describing, I think you're going to have a tough sell for the merits of this process if the "win" case and the "lose" case have identical outcomes, but differ only in the language that is used.

I think everyone has their expectations set too high for A. what a petition will really achieve and B. that the executive branch has any position to change laws. The parent to your comment seems to sum this up pretty well.

So while I see your point that many may view this as ineffective and therefore a loss I definitely consider it a win in agreement with the parent.

1. Petition was made 2. Signature goal was met 3. WH responded favorably in agreement with petition supporters. 4. ... 5. Profit! ;)

Exactly, I just think it's a tough sell when the difference between the non-believer case which sees this as ineffective, and the believer case that sees this as a "win," is sufficiently low expectations about what this achieves (nothing).

The larger question is a tension, not about what this process produces, but about what this process reproduces. The really dangerous aspect of ineffective but affirming processes like these is the implication that We the People have the power no matter how much evidence accumulates to the contrary. It follows logically that when The People don’t affect changes in our system, we must not want to change it. Hypothetically, we believe in justice, freedom, etc. or we would not have formed a democracy. Since we freedom-loving, democratic people would naturally act to end oppression as soon as we found it out, it follows that if a policy, law or practice does not change then it must not truly oppress people.

Clearly, this train of thought has not, does not and will never transport us to a genuinely free society.

So I think we've achieved a "win" in getting the White House to say publicly that they support this. The original petition them to either convince the Librarian to reverse the decision (which I realized at the time was kind of impossible), or to champion a bill in Congress. They aren't quite championing a bill, but the response indicates that "The Obama Administration would support a range of approaches to addressing this issue, including narrow legislative fixes."

I'd much prefer a broad fix, repealing Section 1201 of the DMCA, So that's what I'm working on next. Having the WH says that there are real problems that need to be addressed by Congress seems like a "win" - but perhaps of the milder kind. A loss would have been if they defended carrier/CTIA positions, or simply stated that the Librarian of Congress has authority and that they can't take action. Both of those were definitely a possibility.

Generally, I agree about the danger of affirming processes that don't result in real action. If the bombard-congress-campaign I'm working on at FixtheDMCA.org works, we've got the abstraction in place to let other people create similar campaigns relatively easily. Which will hopefully those freedom-loving, democratic folk get more involved in the political process, which is ultimately what we want.

I think other similar platforms, for example Causes or Change.org fall woefully short in actually affecting change legislatively. Hopefully what we're working on will be better in those regards.

In the 3rd paragraph of your petition you allude to unlocking your phone for use on multiple carriers:

"Consumers will be forced to pay exorbitant roaming fees to make calls while traveling abroad."

If their response only applies to situations where you've let your service contract expire, it doesn't seem to allow you to unlock your phone for use on multiple carriers while under contract with the carrier from which the phone was purchased. Could you clarify whether you're satisfied that their approach would avoid criminal liability in such a situation?

You can be a current customer with outside of the (typically two year) contract period. Currently AT&T (and possibly other carriers?) will unlock the phone for you in this situation. But, it wouldn't be terrible to have this specifically allowed/required.

You sound like you've thought a lot about the issue, so i'm curious what impact you think the WIPO Copyright Treaty will have. Since anti-circumvention is required by a treaty that we ratified, doesn't that make trying to totally repeal it an extremely uphill battle? Are there any recent examples where we did that? What is the impact on the US with WIPO if we officially contradict it?

What are the pros and cons versus trying to amend it down until it didn't apply to much of anything?

Yep, this is definitely a tricky part of it. Trying to figure this out with the EFF at the moment. Will try and elaborate soon, on a really tight deadline at the moment.

> We the People

You're confused about who "We the People" are. "We the People" are not the technolgenstia that hangs out on HN. "We the People" are my wife's parents in rural Oregon. There are things they care about, but this is not one of those things.

"What this process reproduces" is inaction on issues that don't rile up more than a tiny minority of people. I'm not sure why this is surprising.

""" > "We the People" are not the technolgenstia that hangs out on HN. "We the People" are my wife's parents in rural Oregon. There are things they care about, but this is not one of those things. """

Processes like this affirm the logic that government fails us because we the people are too apathetic, or too unaware, or too stupid, or too anything at all to yield our immense power (!) as we ought. That, yes, if we enlightened/progressive few could only mobilize, inform, or educate the public, then everything would work out beautifully!

Power can rest easy as long as we place blame on ourselves and not them for our alienated position in modern society, and that will continue until we recognize the lack of agency that we have, rather than reproducing processes which give us a false sense of agency.

As I see it, there's basically two ways to effect change. One is to trust that the abstract entity 'government' is a benevolent being and that we have but to supply a couple of good arguments to make it do the right thing.

The other is to take matters into our own hands and to force them to make those decisions that we want, if only by making a clear statement of: "if you want to keep your little seat of power, you better do these things we want or we'll vote in someone who will".

Approach one is naive at best: even if people in government are generally willing to make the right decisions (which is by no means a given), identifying what decisions those are is a hard problem to begin with, and that's is compounded by the fact that there are many more forces at play than mere morality (pah!).

Positive change doesn't just magically come about because many people sit on their couches being really, really in favour of something. They come about when many people get off their couches and take action. Our governments fail us because we've largely forgotten that democracy is more than going into the voting booth every 4 years and choosing between bad and worse.

That is an uncharitable way of putting it though. There are some very good reasons (or excuses) for our failure to fulfil our part of the contract in a healthy democracy.

If you work 12 hours a day just to make ends meet, live paycheck to paycheck, and all you have energy for in the evenings and weekends is sitting on the couch and absorbing whatever dribble the telly feeds you, it's hard to summon the willpower to improve your long term perspectives.

Similarly (though I don't mean to equate the two scenarios), if you're a privileged software engineer who makes 6 figures, it's hard to summon the motivation or even detect the problem. What do you mean? What problem? I'm doing fine, and so do all the other (privileged rich) people I know.

You know what? I started out writing this to disagree with you, to place the blame squarely with a lazy and inactive citizenry. Now... I'm not so sure any more. So thanks for giving me something to think about!

> we the people are too apathetic, or too unaware, or too stupid, or too anything at all to yield our immense power

This is what has been happening: We've been too hesitant to wield our immense power, meaning we've been yielding it by default to those who are willing to use it.

(The autocorrect error here was way too apropos to pass up.)

There are still disagreements within a genuinely free society, and those are what the government exists to adjudicate.

We The People do have the power, but to exercise it in one's preferred direction, one needs to get most of the People to agree on the same direction and priorities. That is not easy to do, regardless of how self-evident the benefits of a particular policy direction might appear to oneself individually.

It isn't reasonable to think that an online petition site created by a presidential administration will directly result in passed legislation without the involvement of Congress.

Publicizing the issue and getting an official favorable response from the President is not actually nothing.

I'm curious what you propose as an alternative, which will allow one individual among several hundred million to feel as if they are politically empowered even when the majority of the country completely disagrees with them, meaning that in reality they have no influence.

Or is the point that special people (you?) should be empowered more than others?

Just the opposite. What I'm suggesting is that it's better to recognize the lack of agency we have than to reproduce processes which give us a false sense of agency.

I think for a given case that may be true. That is, for case 'A' where the WH agrees but the other branches disagree, then it will seem as if it's a false sense of power (a placebo mechanism). However, just because this is true in some cases does not preclude there being case 'B' where the WH agrees and the other branches agree, in which case one would have exerted influence.

I think people do understand that not all their wishes can come true and that there are others whose wishes are the exact opposite (with respect to rules and.

So long as the process is predictable and somewhat transparent, then I think people's expectations will be reasonable.

So the argument here is: detractors say petitions are inefficient since no matter what happens with it nothing changes. But we say - look! WH responded! True, nothing changed, but you couldn't expect anything to change from a mere petition! So you were wrong to say nothing would change!

Somehow this argument does not sound convincing. Yes, one shouldn't expect too much from a mere petition - but that's what was said from the very beginning!

As for president's apparent inability to change laws - give me a break. He's the leader of the major US party who just won the elections, he controls the Senate, he has wide range of supporters in the press, he can successfully solicit billions in donations - and he's absolutely powerless to do any effort towards fixing this little thing? Somehow I have hard time believing it.

You need to understand that nothing could change. The White House has responded that they are on our side. Obama is not a tsar: he can't go in and change the law. So to detractors, I say: You turned the key in the ignition and the car started. You still have to drive the damn thing to get where you need to be.

He can't go in and change the law by himself. He can go in and initiate the process that would lead to the change in the law - and he successfully did it many times for things that matter to him, like raising taxes. When we see that happening, then we could say something changed. But before that it's just words, and politicians are professionals in telling people what they want to hear, it costs them nothing.

>>>> You still have to drive the damn thing to get where you need to be.

Driving the car is not done by internet petitions, though. That's the whole point - having WH say something on some page worth nothing, they did it many times on many issues, and they can keep doing what they did before regardless, and renege on all promises, and people would just say "oh, we can't expect too much from them - they're just the President and the ruling party, who could expect they could actually do anything?" If they can't - who can?

Actually, he can issue an executive order with the same language used by the Library of Congress, but he chose not to do so.

I'm curious though, under what authority is the Librarian of Congress allowed to modify the DMCA exclusion list?

This exemption process is part of the DMCA. The Copyright Office's rulemaking statement begins with several pages answering your question: http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2012/2012-26308_PI.pdf

And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac... has a quick explanation:

> In addition to the safe harbors and exemptions the statute explicitly provides, 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(1) requires that the Librarian of Congress issue exemptions from the prohibition against circumvention of access-control technology. Exemptions are granted when it is shown that access-control technology has had a substantial adverse effect on the ability of people to make non-infringing uses of copyrighted works.

> The exemption rules are revised every three years. Exemption proposals are submitted by the public to the Registrar of Copyrights, and after a process of hearings and public comments, the final rule is recommended by the Registrar and issued by the Librarian. Exemptions expire after three years and must be resubmitted for the next rulemaking cycle. Consequently, the exemptions issued in the prior rulemakings, in 2000, 2003 and 2006 are no longer valid.

ah, but this is not a law that needs changing, it's the Librarian's opinion that needs changing. It's a ruling, not a law. Basically, Obama just told everyone to shut up and suck a lemon. If he wanted to change it, he could call the Librarian and say "Hey, I need you to change something for me", or just publish an executive order - change it or get on my kill list.

He could change it, but he's not interested enough to change it.

> As for president's apparent inability to change laws - give me a break. He's the leader of the major US party who just won the elections, he controls the Senate, he has wide range of supporters in the press, he can successfully solicit billions in donations - and he's absolutely powerless to do any effort towards fixing this little thing? Somehow I have hard time believing it.

Sure he's not powerless to change it. But it's a little issue that doesn't matter to more than a few people, so he's not going to use his time or political capital to do the legwork himself. What he's doing is giving you the thumbs-up to proceed on the issue yourself.

This statement is something you can take to your house representative and go: "look, the President supports this!" You can petition the FCC to exert pressure. You can get some of those 100,000 people who signed the petition to call their Congress-people. And you can tell them, "hey, the President has gone on the record as supporting this.". To a Congress-person it suggests that it might be worth someone's time to draft up a bill and score some easy points. It gives you something to build a coalition around. That's huge.

I believe step 4 is something like Jed Bartlet's response to Ted Marcus in the West Wing episode "20 Hours in LA" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc77OgcrSW8).

The president is a human starting gun. If Obama made a press release saying "We will fix this," it _instantly_ becomes a major part of the national dialog. Putting out a positive response saying "we support this and want to make it happen" is a weaker form of that. It puts it in articles, newspapers, on the minds of the FCC, the Library of Congress, Representatives and Senators.

Getting legislation changed is (and probably should be) a _huge_ hurdle. Step 1 is to put the problem in front of people that have the power to make changes. This does that in a big way.

I think you're accepting B without giving it enough thought.

Very few wireless carrier issues are legislated by congress - that falls on the regulator, the FCC. If you want to let customers switch carriers that's who will make it happen. If the president told Genachowski to make it happen for real, it's very likely he would. At worst it would end up on terms on upcoming wireless auctions, but that wouldn't be too bad given that they're going in to converged networks.

If someone tells you to go to congress to get a bill passed to amend the DMCA they may not hate you but they're certainly not helping you. Anything altering the DMCA will attract amendments like crazy, and anything anti-carrier will get tons of lobbyist attention. And then even if you win you've still left me with a phone that the existing people who are perfectly happy to break the law and unlock your phones for a fee have no idea how to unlock - so I'll still be tied to my carrier anyway.

> B. that the executive branch has any position to change laws.

I am so glad that someone actually said this! We used to understand that the president's primary job was command-in-chief of the armed services and to represent the strength of our nation, in a diplomatic way of course. More recently people think that the president is the commander-in-chief of the legislature. WTF. That is not his primary job. He can veto and try to enforce law, but not legislate.

> merits of this process

I can't really imagine a more effective outcome in any representative democracy of 300 million people where 99% of them don't give a shit about your "right" to tinker with your cell phone.

They don't have identical outcomes at all - but your expected outcome timeline sounds like it is unrealistic.

Changing laws (generally) takes years.

The White House response is now the lead article on the home page of the Wall Street Journal. This petition has elevated the issue to a mainstream discussion in a way it was not previously. I think most skeptics would have to agree that type of response certainly constitutes a win. Short of a referendum (which is not possible here), what else could you be hoping for?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732349450457834...

Honest question: what do you think they should have said that they didn't? (Keeping in mind that the Librarian of Congress doesn't work for the Whitehouse)

To offer at least one answer to my own question: "The White House only supports unlocking when consumers have fulfilled their contractual obligations. It’s silent on whether it supports a consumer’s decision to unlock their phone in the middle of their contract."

http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/obama-s-stance-on-unlock...