It's doubtful that Tara Grubb worries Hollywood's movie moguls or the people who run the record industry. Maybe she should.
A movement is beginning to stir in America, an overdue reaction to the predations of a cartel that is bidding to control how digital information may be created and used. Grubb, almost by accident, is becoming one of the movement's new icons.
She's is running for Congress in North Carolina this fall. The incumbent is U.S. Rep. Howard Coble, a Republican in his ninth two-year term. She's a Libertarian, and her chances of victory are the proverbial slim to none.
But a portion of her platform is starting to attract interest from outside Coble's congressional district. She does not believe that Hollywood, the record companies and their allies should be able to have absolute control over copyrighted material, or that the entertainment cartel should be able to dictate what technological innovations may or may not hit the marketplace.
Moreover, she strongly opposes a bill, co-sponsored by Coble, that would give the entertainment companies unprecedented permission to tamper remotely with file-sharing networks and computers.
Coble is chairman of a key House committee dealing with issues of ``intellectual property'' -- and the cartel has been one of his chief financial supporters. According to the invaluable Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org), the entertainment industry was second only to lawyers in sending him money.
There's no surprise in Coble's use of political, corporate and financial networks to raise money from outside his district. Industries have learned to put their dollars in the hands of people who can repay the largesse through legislation and other favors.
Now, people on another kind of network -- the Internet -- have found a way to challenge Coble. And Grubb, like others worried about industry's moves to control information flow, is learning quickly to take advantage of this new way of doing things.
Grubb, 26, came to the attention of Net activists largely because several webloggers -- bloggers for short, those increasingly ubiquitous writers of online journals -- have been wondering how to fight back against the cartel and the politicians who support it.
In the past week, partly at the urging of those bloggers, she's created a weblog (http://radio.weblogs.com/0112137/). On that site she's taking stands and answering questions from the Web community that sees an opportunity to at least put a scare into Coble.
The congressman is feeling the heat from more than Grubb. Again, Net activism is involved. Ed Cone, a journalist who also writes a blog (http://radio.weblogs.com/0107946/), wrote a column about the peer-to-peer legislation for a newspaper in Coble's district, and that piece helped spur an editorial challenging the bill.
Is this a breakthrough in political activism? Not exactly. Candidates and others involved in political issues have been online for a long time.
But the way the Net community and Grubb found each other is interesting, at the very least. Maybe the technology that Hollywood finds so threatening is being turned more effectively into countering some pernicious trends.
Certainly the information flow among weblogs is having a cumulative effect. People are helping each other understand the issues, and they're hunting for ways to make a difference.
Supporting challengers to especially retrograde members of Congress is an excellent start. The National Rifle Association's clout has been due in part to its, forgive the expression, targeting of individual members of Congress. The lessons are not lost on other candidates when a well-focused interest group works to tip the scales.
I'm not a one-issue voter, but this issue is growing in importance. The entertainment industry and its supporters are threatening free speech and innovation in their zeal to protect an outdated business model. I intend to find out how every candidate for public office in my state and various political districts feels about these issues, and take their responses seriously when I go to the polls.
Several weeks ago I said here that you need to get active if you are concerned about the way the cartel is trying to take over the flow of information. You don't have to be a weblogger or political candidate to make a difference.
There are organizations already working on your behalf. I urge you to visit their Web sites and then, if you agree with what they're saying and doing, consider supporting them with your contributions, time and energy.
Two of the more prominent organizations are the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org), which has been at this for more than a decade, and the much newer DigitalConsumer.org (www.digitalconsumer.org). I'm going to create a Web page listing every such group I can find. Let me know of the ones you're familiar with.
Here's something you can do yourself, right now, as several readers mentioned. The Federal Communications Commission has started a rule-making process that could severely cripple viewers' ability to record TV shows for later viewing, among other restrictions, in the next generation of TV sets.
The commission has requested public comments on this proposal, which Hollywood naturally favors. I'll post more details about this issue, and what you can do specifically, on my Web page.
Meanwhile, please write letters to your representative in the U.S. House (www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html) , and to both of your senators (www.senate.gov/senators/senator_by_state.cfm). If you don't tell them what you think, they'll be listening to just one side -- the cartel's.
