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MPAA School Propaganda Program Examined
Anonymous Coward copies-and-pastes: "'As part of its campaign to thwart online music and movie piracy, Hollywood is now reaching into school classrooms with a program that denounces file-sharing and offers prizes for students and teachers who spread the word about Internet theft. The Motion Picture Association of America paid $100,000 to deliver its anti-piracy message to 900,000 students nationwide in grades 5-9 over the next two years, according to Junior Achievement Inc., which is implementing the program using volunteer teachers from the business sector." Only $100,000 to advertise to 900,000 students? What a deal! We mentioned this earlier.
offering money to kids who turn other kids in...
"Rat on your friends, redeem valuable prizes!"
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
remember when Ronald Reagon first started that war on drugs that even rewarded children for snitching on their parents...
even if you had a little pot in the home it was like you were an axe murderer...
now children, if your mommy and daddy have kazaa on their computer you be sure to tell us so we can sue the hell out of them and\or put them behind bars where they belong...
Send them to re-education camps!! Bribing teachers to teach an agenda of the MPAA should be illegal. In fact I bet it is, but the MPAA is "above the law."
-Seriv
Saw a congresscritter on the tube the other day (can't remember her name) foaming at the mouth, saying that downloading a song from the internet was stealing, just as if they had stolen a CD from a store, and should be prosecuted as such.
Ummmmmmmmmm, no. One is a civil copyright violation, roughly analogous to skipping out on a one dollar phone bill and basically the same as photocopying a chapter from a library book, and the other is larceny, the same as stealing a library book.
With great legal minds like that writing our laws is it any wonder we are where we are?
KFG
Why dont' the state BOR's or any superindendents step up and say "not in our schools!"?? This has no actual educational merit whatsoever, and should not set foot inside any schools: public, private, or higher learning. It's like Coke coming in and preaching that "drinking Pepsi destroys our employee's way of life, because you're using another product". In the end it's just another corporation trying to save it's own ass. If they just put the money towards education in general (so they can get good jobs), or somehow helping the economy, maybe kids could AFFORD to buy their products instead of stealing them. Ok, I'll stop ranting now.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
"If you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it."
Conversely, that means if I paid for it, I OWN it. Not a license of it, not some right to it, but OWN it. Now I can copy, broadcast, whatever. If the RIAA is going to boil things down, so will I. Time to give all those mp3's I OWN to my friends.
Does that mean that I stole Mandrake 9.1 when I installed it for a file server a little while ago? I definitely didn't pay for it, heck I even downloaded it from online. They have, in effect, accused anybody who uses Linux of being a thief. Hey, don't they use Linux renderfarms in Hollywood for graphics?
"The Motion Picture Association of America paid $100,000 to deliver its anti-piracy message to 900,000 students nationwide in grades 5-9 over the next two years"
And this is going to make an impact... how? Most kids at that age are smart enough to know when they are being jacked, even if they didn't, they would only be under the spell until the "prizes" ran out. If the MPAA went to 1st graders, prizes would probably reel them in without question. The problem with that is 1st graders, assuming they are computer literate, do not go downloading massive quantities of MP3s or DivX encoded movies.
<paranoid_rant>
Now if you ask me, the real goal for the MPAA in doing this is to trick the children into admitting they have downloaded a movie or two before and then threaten to sue their parents for everything they've got... To avoid litigation, the parents can agree to have the child stop using the computer altogether, and give him a calculator to play with instead.
</paranoid_rant>
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
Fundamentally the Republican-Democrat axis is about the distribution of wealth. That's orthogonal to social liberalism and social conservatism.
You can be very pro-business and still believe in individual's right to smoke pot or engage in wild homosexual consensual ass-pounding romps. On the other hand, you may lean to the left when it comes to money and believe at the same time that gay sex is an aberration or that any use of drugs weakens the society.
The social conservatives were pushed back in the 1960s and 1970s, but they are making a strong comeback - unfortunately.
-- Kircle
The suits who run the studios are so disconnected* from the techies in the render farms that such issues never enter their brains.** And to big-corp-think, of course, free software -- free anything -- is an abomination and unclean anyway. Understanding this, IMO, is key to understanding everything from the [MP|RI]AA's reaction to piracy, to Microsoft's reaction to Linux. In their perfect world, you pay for everything; more specifically, you pay them for everything. The idea that anyone might be able to get useful stuff for free wakes them up in screaming nightmares. This is not rational cost-benefit analysis. This is a clash of worldviews as fundamental as Galileo's with the Church.
--
* I'm not claiming any special insider knowledge of how Hollywood studios work. This is my guess based on my experience of how big corporations work in general.
** If they have brains. Or hearts. Or courage. All of which are highly debatable.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If it's illegal in America, host it in Uzbekistan," snapped the 14-year-old.
The kids know its B.S. Just like back when I was in school and the D.A.R.E program was out with the whole "Drugs are Bad m'kay" movement. Yes heavy narcotic use is bad and awareness education serves its purpose, but even then it wasn't terribly effective. Even the "good" kids smoked dope when they got to High School. Come to think of it, especially the good kids.
I trust that junior high kids are by and large savvy enough to recognize B.S., and the "Bad apples" will go download stuff just because they aren't supposed to.
Making a profit is a good thing. This is what
happens when making a profit becomes the ONLY
thing. We even allow corporations to indoctrinate
our children, in school, to the ideas and concepts
that are most useful to the profiteers. Welcome
to the new slavery.......
I saw this article when my sons brought it home
and showed it to me (they like to see me yell
at the air). Fortunately, even at 12, my boys
know corporate propaganda when they see it. It's
a shame the school I pay dearly for (public,
of course) doesn't.
This is where home schooling comes in......
You know, wouldn't it be nice to spend the money to educate kids on something else which might be a little more important, like saving their lives by not smoking. Or maybe we could teach our kids that they shouldn't eat a whole XL tub of popcorn with extra butter every time they see a movie, or else they'll become a fat-ass just like mom and dad. I'm glad the MPAA has plenty of money, which it got from all these kids parents who bought every stupid Disney movie that came out for these same kids. Now the MPAA turns around and shits on its loyal customers by treating all of them like criminals. It will be interesting when the public as a whole finally starts feely betrayed by the MPAA and people stop watching movies just like they've already stopped buying CD's. Then the MPAA will have to go to the governement to try to get a law passed requiring every man, woman, and child to see a certain number of movies a year. You'll have to fill your quota for the good of everyone so that the motion picture industry can continue selling to you an over-priced and vacuous product. It's kind of like the telemarketing industry, we can't afford to let it die or else we'll lose all those "quality" jobs.
My senior year in high school showed me the relationship between schools and companies.
Our school district was hurting for money like most school districts were. The high school principal offered exclusive selling rights to Coca-Cola and Pepsi. We had a survey in school on which we would prefer. Something like 78% wanted Pepsi. Pepsi offered the district $50,000 for exclusive rights for one year. Coke offered $55,000. The district went with Coke.
Many things at our school such as scoreboards were donated by Pepsi. They of course had the Pepsi logo. When they were donated there was a contract that stated the logos must say on otherwise ownership will go back to Pepsi.
Coke made many threats to sue the district if the logos were not removed. They finally had to remove the logos which resulted in Pepsi removing the signs.
My point here is that the district didn't gain anything. They had to buy new scoreboards and other equipment Pepsi originally "donated." From this real life experience I learned that schools are no place for ANYONE to advertise.
It seems to me that $100,000 is really a lot of money. Pirates' propaganda is free. As are their high-quality movies, software, and music. Some things don't need advertising, like drugs and piracy, and no matter what their argument is, it's not going to work if it's not based in reality. The "all drugs are the same and they'll all kill you" argument's certainly effective, as will be the "all the record/music companies want to do is foster artists' creativity, and bring you the wonderful colors that brighten up your miserable lives, but you just won't let us. Please, let us love you!" argument that the entertainment industry is trying to sell us. The sarcasm is dripping. Help, I've got a sarcasm drip!
The riaa should learn from this lesson, too. If you try to charge someone more for a product because you assume they're going to do something illegal, people will find a way to get around the higher price. Proactive high prices don't fly in a capitalist society where everyone is waiting for the sale price, and unwilling to believe bullshit about "these are for data, those are for music" when they're identical except for the price.
That reminds me about something else. Some years ago, a contact lens manufacturer was successfully sued because they sold the same lens as both a permanent and and disposable lens. The labelling was different, and the price (something like $1 for the 'disposable' and $100 for the 'permanent'). The quality of the lens was the same.
I thought it had been made illegal to sell the same product deceptively this way and try to charge a higher price because of this ruling.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.