m2bord's Journal: Things that need to be codified in law

We need to be clear on some things and they need to be put into law.

1) Fair-use. Our ability to create backup copies of legally purchased media must be preserved. The media production industries, audio and video, have a built in level of repear sales that comes from lost, stolen, or worn out copies of media. It should not be illegal for a consumer who makes a legitimate purchase to create backup copies of their media for their personal use. For instance, after I purchase an audio cd, I rip it and make a cd copy of it to keep in my car, and I load the songs on to my MP3 player. I am doing nothing illegal however, the manufacturers of these media would like to be similar to Microsoft and other software manufacturers and purchase a license for each device that the media will be played back on.

    In short...instead of making one sale and allowing the user to determine what devices they wish to play it on, they would rather force consumers to buy one copy for their home cd player, one copy for their computer, one copy for their car, and additional copies for every device.

2) A universal school curriculm needs to be adopted. A child who's parents move from Virginia to California should rest easy in pulling their child out of class, and the child should sit down in their new seat, open the same textbook to the same page that their old classroom would be on.

3) Infomercials should be limited only to no more than .5% of a television station/network's total 24 hour programming period. In short...no more than one hour per day. American consumers are paying a lot of money to cable television and satellite networks and for what? At any given time after midnight, a consumer can find infomercials on late night television convering 80% of the available channels.

4) The final thing that should be written in law...domestic partnerships should be given the same standing as a married couple in the governments eyes. I have friends and neighbors who live in an alternative lifestyle. They choose their partner in the same way a husband and wife choose one another. No one has asked for any church or religious group to bless these arrangments but they do ask for the government, to which they pay taxes, to treat them equally.