http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/mpaa-school-propaganda/Listen up children: Cheating on your homework or cribbing notes from another student is bad, but not as bad as sharing a music track with a friend, or otherwise depriving the content-industry of its well-earned profits.
That’s one of the messages in a new-school curriculum being developed with the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the nation’s top ISPs, in a pilot project to be tested in California elementary schools later this year.
A near-final draft of the curriculum, obtained by WIRED, shows that it comes in different flavors for every grade from kindergarten through sixth, to keep pace with your developing child’s ability to understand that copying is theft, period.
“This thinly disguised corporate propaganda is inaccurate and inappropriate,” says Mitch Stoltz, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who reviewed the material at WIRED’s request.
“It suggests, falsely, that ideas are property and that building on others’ ideas always requires permission,” Stoltz says. “The overriding message of this curriculum is that students’ time should be consumed not in creating but in worrying about their impact on corporate profits.”
The material was prepared by the California School Library Association and the Internet Keep Safe Coalition in conjunction with the Center For Copyright Infringement, whose board members include executives from the MPAA, RIAA, Verizon, Comcast and AT&T.
Each grade’s material includes a short video, and comes with a worksheet for teachers to use that’s packed with talking points to share with students.
In the sixth-grade version, (.pdf) teachers are asked to engage students with the question: “In school, if we copy a friend’s answers on a test or homework assignment, what happens?”
The answer is, you can be suspended from school or flunk the test. The teachers are directed to tell their students that there are worse consequences if they commit a copyright violation.
“In the digital world, it’s harder to see the effects of copying, even though the effects can be more serious,” the teacher worksheet says.
The material is silent on the concept of fair use, a legal doctrine that allows for the reproduction of copyrighted works without the rights holder’s permission. Instead, students are told that using works without permission is “stealing.”
“Justin Bieber got started singing other people’s songs, without permission, on YouTube. If he had been subjected to this curriculum, he would have been told that what he did was ‘bad, ‘stealing,’ and could have landed him in jail,” says Stoltz.
“We’ve got some editing to do,” concedes Glen Warren, vice president of the California School Library Association, the non-profit that helped produce the material with the Internet Keep Safe Coalition and industry.
The Internet Keep Safe Coalition is a non-profit partnering with various governments and some of the nation’s biggest corporate names like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Target, Xerox, HP and others.
