Why DOES Google lobby so much? • The Register

Much ado about a "non-profit"

So what then is Coadec, and why is it so keen to prod startups into this non-vital area?

Coadec describes itself in a rather hazy brief as "a non-profit organisation, made up of a wide range of members ... who believe that the future of Britain lies in the success of its digital economy".

It was set up with help from Google, and its first offensive was a Google-sponsored report on copyright. When this was finally published in 2011, it posed a dilemma: it turned out digital small-to-medium enterprises were not troubled by the UK's copyright regime and they expressed strong support for intellectual property.

(The Coadec survey found that 66 per cent of digital SMEs thought UK copyright is fair versus 10 per cent which didn't; 72 per cent of digital SMEs disagreed that the UK copyright regime stopped them innovating, against 7 per cent who agreed. Brushing all this quantitative evidence aside, the Coadec-Google report focused on qualitative evidence, providing pages of views from web investors and startups advocating change. Several of these are anonymous.)

Coadec has continued to lobby to change the laws of the UK legislative in a way that's more friendly to the Californian web giant.