Re: [Patents] JURI amendments for 22/4 now up (in Italian)

[Russell McOrmond <russell@flora.ca>]

On Sun, 20 Apr 2003, James Heald wrote:

> 2.  As a random member of the public, is it any use at all trying to contact
> MEPs or their staff by email; or is it necessary to send a fax instead to
> have any chance of one's message being looked at ?

  Generally in politics the more convenient it is for you to do something,
the less seriously it will be taken by the recipient.  Faxes are better
than emails, but phone calls are better than faxes and setting up meetings
in person is always the best.

  This isn't specific to MEPs, but politics in general.  I have found that
it applies to bureaucrats as well as representatives, and I have had many
meetings in the last two years (on FLOSS and IP issues) with both
bureaucrats and Canadian federal MP's.

  Above formal meetings is to build a trusting personal relationship,
which is why having mixed citizen/private/public groups such as what we
have formed with http://www.goslingcommunity.org/ has been pretty critical
to our work here.


Note:  Patents are a side-issue (a threat) to my primary policy area which
is Free/Libre and Open Source Software.  This is why I only recently
joined lists such as this one and am playing public policy catch-up.  I
have 11+ years of FLOSS work (back when it was just Free Software), but
only 2+ years of copyright reform (due to the expansion into interface
copyright/TPM) and only recently had an interest in patents (with the
addition of anti-FLOSS royalty-bearing patents in ICT software standards).

---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
 Any 'hardware assist' for communications, whether it be eye-glasses, 
 VCR's, or personal computers, must be under the control of the citizen 
 and not a third party.   -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/