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Just came across again an essay by Pamela Samuelson, Professor of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley, Toward a new politics of intellectual property, in which she points out the difficulty of getting the general public to be concerned about issues of copyright and intellectual property. (other articles by Pamela here)

On the other hand, copyright industry groups (media and software) have been diligent to cultivate influential relationships with policymakers.

A parallel can be drawn with the extremely powerful political concept of ecology. If we look back to the 1950's, there was no concept of the environment. Now, it is no longer possible for commercial ventures to ignore the effect of their activities on natural resources. (This parallel was drawn by James Boyle in his essay Environmentalism for the Net)

What is needed is a public awareness of the environment of the internet. The web has become the primary vehicle for the expression of human culture, and therefore it is in the interests of us all to maintain a balanced information ecology. This balance could be threatened by the trend towards overly developed intellectual property rights and the technical measures to enforce them.