Perez Hilton and Carrie Prejean are so Mickey Mouse

MANIFESTO

While I know who Carrie Prejean is, I've pretty much stopped paying attention to her actions since her sordid past was uncovered, so to speak.

Anyway, she (and the National Organization for Marriage) and Perez Hilton have gotten into a pissing match over some nonsense that's kind of explained here. At any rate, the altercation involves the Fair Use Act, one of my favorite bills ever passed since it allows educators to make copies of copyrighted work for classroom use. Since educational budgets are never adequate to concomitant goals, the FUA is indispensable in getting materials to students who might otherwise never get them.

Now, this is not to say that every educator uses the FUA in the way it's supposed to be used. That is, since the photocopier made its appearance in our nation's schools, virtually every educator in America has probably broken the law.

However, US copyright laws are so screwed up right now that they probably can't be observed, and it's all Steamboat Willie's fault. When in the 1990s the Disneyans realized that they were about to lose ownership of their precious rodent, they couldn't lobby Congress hard enough to abandon the notion of public domain. And so, by law, the local nursery school can't display images of Goofy or Pluto without getting it cleared by Burbank.

With that kind of nonsense going on, it seems like everybody has just thrown up his hands and is violating copyright laws willy-nilly. Thus, NOM's attempt to invoke the FUA in order to promote its homophobic agenda seems doomed to failure.