Interesting blog by Chris Castle that raises important questions about the Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights’ (CCER) letter writing wizard and manipulation of the Copyright Consultations.
Castle describes CCER as “a mod chip makers trade association” “that allowed users to send a pre-fabricated letter to a predetermined but undisclosed list of ministers and Members of Parliament that supported a wide variety of anti-copyright—and especially anticircumvention—issues.”
He says: “The CCER letter writing wizard seems to be of very, very questionable provenance.” Castle states that “A little quick sampling of the posted letters suggests that a substantial number of them (perhaps over half) came from CCER.” (The number is much higher than that; by my estimate approx. 65%).
He concludes “This entire process is illustrative of the problems of the digital constituency that plague the online electorate, and is something to which careful attention must be paid.”
