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A comment on Leaked: What's in TPP’s intellectual property chapter. Parent comment

Re:Leaked: What's in TPP’s intellectual property chapter by scarmig on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @07:32PM (#9815973)
How is this any different from the panoply of public lobbying and advocacy organizations that exist today? The Chamber of Commerce pulls in $200 million per year. EDF pulls in $121M. Sierra $98M. CAP $40M. Cato $29M. The Family Research Council $13M. The EFF pulls in $10M.

Even the smallest of these are not small numbers. And, if you're interested in policy or political change, you've heard of all of them, and they all make it pretty damn easy to donate money[0]. It's just people don't care that much, and for the people who do care, there's often someone else on the opposite side of things who cares just as much.

It doesn't seem to me that a crowd-funded lobbying platform offers much. Maybe it makes it easier to start up an organization? Sure, I guess, but it doesn't give me any confidence that they'll use any funds I give in an effective way. At least major, well-known organizations have a brand to defend and have to be able to prove repeatable successes.

[0] The EFF, which I got to in 5 seconds by DuckDuckGoing "EFF donate": https://supporters.eff.org/donate

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Re:Leaked: What's in TPP’s intellectual property chapter by icanhackit on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @07:59PM (#9816089)
Going by this argument there's no point using Kickstarter because you could already fund projects without it. But what Kickstarter did was act as a hub for many different projects (EFF won't help much for anything pertaining to health care), a public tracker to monitor progress and outcome, a means of describing what the goals are and what different fund totals will help achieve, and a trusted method to transfer funds.

Within each Lobby Kickstarter you could outline which organizations would receive funds for specific goals, e.g. ACLU for particular civil liberties that are under attack, EFF to address dragnet surveillance etc. Yes you're adding a middleman but you have a one stop shop for initiatives that range far and wide. You could also keep score of which organizations have been successful so that you have an additional trust mechanism, much the way a company might keep track of its subcontractors when choosing who to use to get a job done.

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Re:Leaked: What's in TPP’s intellectual property chapter by crdoconnor on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @09:06PM (#9816334)
Cato is another front for corporate lobbying.
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Re:Leaked: What's in TPP’s intellectual property chapter by stephengillie on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @07:59PM (#9816090)
The EFF even has an Amazon Smile account, so you can donate that way too.
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