Send your own letters to MEPs using copyright maximalist action-centre

The "Campaign for Creativity" is an astro-turf letter-writing campaign that aims to get people to write to MEPs demanding even stronger copyright laws for Europe:

I am writing to say that it is important to me that Europe has strong intellectual property laws in place and that they are enforced properly.

The creative industries are under assault from pirates, counterfeiters and those who want weaken or remove the protections that enable the creative industries to function. 17,000 jobs a year and billions of Euros are lost every year because the IP laws are weak or not enforced.

Please support us when you're elected. We're counting on you!

But you can write your own letter and paste it in. Here's the full text of mine, and an excerpt:

File-sharing is part of the traditional cycle of new technology development: from the phonorecord to the VCR, from the radio to the satellite service, every new technology that lowered the barriers to reproducing and distributing copyrighted works has had to make use of the popular media of the day to conjure itself into existence -- usually over the howls of protest of rights-holders who were merely the legitimized pirates of from the last fight.

When the phonorecord people bitterly fought radio, they conveniently forgot that they'd built their business through widescale infringement of the sheet-music publishers. It's no different today: filmmakers (who enthusiastically violated Edison's film patents), broadcasters (who played records without permission or payment), cablecasters (who pirated free-to-air signals for their networks) and even hybrid entertainment/electronics companies (like Sony, whose piratical VCR was characterized by the motion-picture people as the certain death of the film industry) are all standing shoulder to shoulder in the fight against programmers and ordinary citizens who have, once again, discovered a better way to distribute and reproduce creative works.

It's no surprise that these pirates of the entertainment industry want to pull the ladder up behind them and dog the hatch. After all, the traditional role of inventors has been to create massive new revenue opportunities for the entertainment industry, and the traditional response of the entertainment companies has been to seek legislative relief from those opportunities.

Link (Thanks, Alice!)