This is a hard pill for people to swallow, but I think even among the larger engineering crowd copyright reform is a fringe issue. Remember, software companies were hard-chargers in the push for DRM, TPM (remember that?), etc. Copy protection in games, software dongles for high-end software, etc. Most traditional software engineers still strongly support copyright--it's the thing that keeps people from "stealing" their products.
It's a subset of the software engineering crowd, the one that works in web space for companies that make money off other peoples' creative work, that sees copyright reform as an important problem. And I think there is a total lack of acknowledgement among this crowd that maybe there are more stakeholders in this issue than just themselves or the big evil music/movie companies. I think there is also a denial of how much certain web companies really depend on other peoples' copyrighted material for their viability (cough Youtube cough).
It's a subset of the software engineering crowd, the one that works in web space for companies that make money off other peoples' creative work, that sees copyright reform as an important problem. And I think there is a total lack of acknowledgement among this crowd that maybe there are more stakeholders in this issue than just themselves or the big evil music/movie companies. I think there is also a denial of how much certain web companies really depend on other peoples' copyrighted material for their viability (cough Youtube cough).