The head of the U.S. Copyright Office, Marybeth Peters (left, from the Library of Congress site), has come out squarely for overturning the Betamax decision, which made your VCR legal.

Corante's Ernest Miller is all over this. But let me add my two cents.

This is an election year. The money and support of the copyright industries could make the difference. The Bush Administration is willing to bend over and grease up in order to gain that support.

And if they win with it, it's the rest of us who are screwed. Or, as Vice President Cheney put it to Senator Pat Leahy, "go f___ yourself."

You will be able to trace the results of Peters' advocacy, but only some of it, at Fundrace.org. Let me add two caveats:

• The copyright industries have given to both sides, and have many friends on the Democratic side of the aisle, including the aforementioned Leahy.
  
• The most important support the copyright industries might give the Administration -- endorsements and slanting of news to suit it -- won't show up on any cash-tracking site.
  

It gets worse than that. Every Web site that caches, every Web client that has cache, could be in violation of this act, and would be in violation if Peters got her way. It's appalling.

What's vital is that the opponents of this INDUCE Act carefully trace who supports it, who opposes it, and get endorsements out widely for opponents of Copyright Totalitarianism by Election Day.

Otherwise the whole country could become a gulag. And don't buy any crap about "we're not going to take your VCR" or "we're just going to target the real criminals." The boundary of the law should be what's written, not some other point where police deem to make the enforcement stand.