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.

Comments

Only a step from

[Kierthos]

offering money to kids who turn other kids in...

"Rat on your friends, redeem valuable prizes!"

Kierthos

Re:Only a step from

[mike77]

And they want to scare of the parents as well. A part of the program is a take home and fill-out-together letter to the parents.

I personally am not a parent, but if I were, I believe I would be pulling my child out of these classes. When did schools become a lobbying forum for corporations? Was it when Coke and Pepsi started battling over who gets the lucrative lunchroom contract? (gotta get the kids hooked early and turn them into "consumers", it's their patriotic american duty) I doubt it will happen, because most people are sheep, but I would really like to see some outrage by the parents. What gives the *AA's the moral ground to stand on and come into the schools, and tell our nations children what is right and wrong. Last time I looked they represented money driven/hungry companies, and I cannot even think of a company anymore to which I can point and say, look, now there's a stand up company who's always done the right thing, and I'm proud to support them.

Parnets, make some noise, and don't sit by while your children are being "educated" by the united corporations of America.

remember

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Interesting! New rights for us!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Quoted from the article...

"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.

Uh huh....

[MoeMoe]

"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>

Re:Brainwashing ?

[Kircle]

More telling I think is the quote that followed:

Bret Balonick, a tax accountant on loan from PricewaterhouseCoopers to teach the anti-piracy class, was arguing that some downloaders have been affected by malicious activity. Besides, he said, it's illegal to upload and download unauthorized content online.

"If it's illegal in America, host it in Uzbekistan," snapped the 14-year-old.

The quote you mentioned does make it look like brainwashing, but the quote I mentioned here makes the kid look bad. Almost like saying, "move your money to a swiss bank account."

Re:overly simplistic

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.