After a brief description of each bill, I'll tell you how you can write your congresspeople about the bills.

1. HR 2239 -- amendment to the Help America Vote Act of 2002 ("Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003")

This bill will require a paper trail be created for electronic voting machines and require voting system software to be available for inspection upon request to any citizen. If you vote without a voter-verifiable paper trail you have no idea who you voted for because your votes are being counted by an organization that could give your vote to some other candidate. You want to be sure the only trusted record of who you really voted for is stored in a way that cannot easily be changed.

The software part of this bill is somewhat unenforceable--the bill lets the public inspect the voting machine software. If the program we'll vote with passes the inspection of someone you trust, how would you ever know that *that* software is running on the machine you vote with? Also, even if you could verify this somehow, you wouldn't have any way to get the complete source code of all the other programs running on that machine at the same time, programs that may interfere with your vote being stored, transmitted, or counted accurately (many voting machines made by the Diebold corporation run on Microsoft Windows, for example). This is why the paper audit trail and preservation of something voter-verifiable is so important.

2. HR 2601 -- The Public Domain Enhancement Act ("Eldred Act")

This bill will set up a copyright registry and establish a small fee for maintaining a copyright beyond 50 years ($1 buys 10 more years of copyright power; the first payment is due after 50 years from first publication date; $1 more is due every 10 years thereafter). The grace period for payment is 6 months.

Currently personal copyright lasts 70 years after death and corporate copyright lasts a flat 90 years. Most copyrighted works are not made for commercial gain and of those that are, most are not commercially viable after 50 years. The goal of the bill is to increase the number of works in the public domain where everyone can share them and build upon them. The registry will be publicly accessible and it will list who has extended the copyright of their work beyond 50 years (who has paid the fee).

3. HR 676 -- United States National Health Insurance Act ("Medicare for All")

This bill will extend Medicare in scope and coverage and exclude private health care suppliers from competing with this plan. Anyone residing in the US (including US territories) is covered under USNHI. You'll fill out a short form and then you'll get a card to show to participating clinicians who deliver the care. The text of the bill lays out what is covered (see section 102 "Benefits and Portability").

This is the bill that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is supporting as his health care plan. This is expected to be the bill backed by the Physicians for a National Health Program (see http://www.pnhp.org/ — there is currently a link to the bill and summary information about the bill on their homepage).

What can you do to help make these bills law?

• Read the bills. They're not very long (HR676 is the longest of them and it's only around 20 pages).
• You can ask your representative (in the Senate or House) to co-sponsor or vote for these bills.

One more bill to support:

HR 107 -- Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act ("DMCRA")

This helps soften some of the offensive parts of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by allowing non-infringing technological circumvention of the copy prevention on a copyrighted work. So, if you want to view that public domain DVD on your GNU/Linux machine or make a decrypted copy of it for a friend, you can break the CSS encryption on it. After all, since it's a movie in the public domain you should be able to do what you want to with it. This bill also lets you do research without fear. Without the DMCRA (the "R" is significant), the DMCA would help put you in the slammer and/or see a stiff fine for breaking copy prevention schemes.

The DMCRA will also compel labeling of incompatible audio CDs so you won't buy something you can't play on your computer, or in your fancy new CD player. You deserve to know before purchase which discs won't work or won't be easily ripped. After all, you might want to make a non-infringing copy for your car or for backup.