Microsoft Pushes Copyright Education Curriculum

Dotnaught writes "Backed by a study that says teens show more respect for copyrights when told of possible jail time for infringement, Microsoft is launching a new intellectual property curriculum to educate kids about IP law. To support its teachings, Microsoft has launched MyBytes, a Web site where students can create custom ringtones, share content — "their own content," as Microsoft makes clear — and learn more about intellectual property rights."

Comments

Re:Duh

[shark72]

"The only people who go to jail for infringement are commercial bootleggers and I can't imagine that'd include anyone under the age of 18 AKA high school students."

Not correct from either a factual or practical standpoint. I grant you that this is what many people believe to be the case, but nonetheless, it's incorrect. This may be one of the reasons why Microsoft is launching the education campaign: to counter falsehoods like the one you've relayed.

At any rate, Kevin Gonzalez uploaded a work print of The Hulk to a P2P network. He did this not for money; perhaps he was part of the scene or he just did it because he thinks information should be free. He was sentenced to six months of home confinement. William Fitzgerald was a fellow who traded warez via IRC; his mistake was making them available on his web server. Again, not for money. Nonetheless, he got four months in prison and four months in home confinement. Then there was Operation Buccaneer, which targeted some of the warez rings (again: amateur warez traders, not bootleggers!) and handed out jail sentences of 18 to 46 months. That's almost four years for non-commercial warez trading.

The "you have to sell it for it to be criminal infringement" is one of those Slashdot memes that will never go away (your post is indeed already 4, informative when it's quite simply incorrect, while this correction will likely languish at 2 or lower). We'll continue to tell each other this, and we'll want it to be true. But the fact remains that Gonzalez and the rest did the jail time. Microsoft will actually be doing a disservice to teens if they don't explain the hard realities of copyright law.