[free-sklyarov] London, Edinburgh protest reports

[Seth David Schoen]

----- Forwarded message from "Julian T. J. Midgley" <jtjm at xenoclast.org> -----

Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2001 02:28:29 +0100 (BST)
From: "Julian T. J. Midgley" <jtjm at xenoclast.org>
Subject: [DMITRY-PLAN] London and Edinburgh Protests - Reports

Apologies for delay in forwarding these - have had to catch up with my
'real' job.  Interest in the DMCA and EUCD is steadily increasing in both
the UK and Europe as a whole. The Chaos Computer Club in Germany is
gearing up to oppose the EUCD which will be brought before the Bundestag
in a matter of weeks.  UK mailing list very active again at the moment,
which is heartening.  Anyway, on to last week's protests:


Last Thursday's London protest outside the US Embassy went very well.
Estimated attendance was 25-30 people, possibly a few more (I can't
say accurately myself, as I only arrived at around 2:30 having been
delayed at work for longer than I was expecting).

Several dedicated teams of flyer dispensing bods did a splendid job,
handing out over 1000 flyers (approximately half and half the new EUCD
flyers, and "What is the DMCA?" flyers, plus a couple of hundred
flyers of various sorts left over from the last US Embassy protest).
Those of us shouting at the Embassy (from a much enlarged repertoire
of chants ;-) ) were once again delighted to see most of those who'd
been given leaflets walking past actually reading them, including,
notably, several employees of the Embassy itself.

Someone (possibly Jason or Gerry?) had printed off several copies of
the "Ballad of Dmitry Sklyarov", which it was universally agreed was a
better song than the DMCA version of "YMCA"; the CFDR's choral
contigent demonstrated a significant increase in volume since its last
meeting, regretably without a similar improvement in tunefulness.
Although, in the spirit of the recent Heineken adverts, this may be to
our advantage... "Drop the Charges! Or we'll come back and sing at you
again - with an amplifier!".

Neil Newell, Chairman of Ashpool Telecom, gave his entire programming
team the day off to attend (all but one of whom did, the other spending
the time reading up on the issues to see whether or not he should have
attended ;-)).

Reporters from Silicon and PC Pro attended, the Register had hoped to send
someone along, who unfortunately fell ill, so they got a briefing over the
phone instead.

Articles have appeared since in the Register and Silicon (including an
editorial), and people having been signing up for both mailing lists
since the press-releases went out on Tuesday night - total membership
(across the two lists, discounting duplicates) has increased from 80 on
Tuesday night to just over 100.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/21375.html
http://www.silicon.com/a46959


Success also in Edinburgh (the following from Ronan Burnett, who organised
the protest):

The Edinburgh protest went well - I lost count of exactly how many people
turned up.  At least 15 people appeared at some point during the day,
although we didn't number any more than about 10 at any one time.

We distributed leaflets, and had people sign the petition to the US
Attorney as we explained the issues.  We marched up to the US consulate
chanting, 'Free Dmitry, Free Speech' and rang their doorbell.  Sadly there
were only 2 people inside and neither would come out from behind the
security door to talk to us.

There's a bunch of photos of the event in chronological order at
http://www.informinus.com/dmca/ if you're interested.

-- 
Julian T. J. Midgley                      http://www.xenoclast.org/
Cambridge, England.                          PGP Key ID: 0xBCC7863F
Beware the European Copyright Directive:  http://uk.eurorights.org/




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