RIAA's Elementary School Copyright Curriculum

selven writes "In a blatant campaign devoid of any subtlety, the RIAA is fighting for the hearts and minds of our children with its Music Rules, a collection of education materials on how to respect copyright. The curriculum includes vocabulary such as 'counterfeit recordings, DMCA notice, "Grokster" ruling, legal downloading, online piracy, peer-to-peer file sharing, pirate recordings, songlifting, and US copyright law.' There is no mention whatsoever of fair use. Compounding the bias, it includes insights such as that taking music without paying for it is 'songlifting,' and that making copies for personal use and then playing them while your friends come over is illegal. On the bright side, it includes math showing that the total damages from copyright infringement by children in the US amount to a measly $7.8 million."

Comments

Okay, You Have the Floor

[eldavojohn]

There is no mention whatsoever of fair use.

Well, there actually is a mention of fair use in the parent guide but all it does is refer you to a better site. The only other mention is -- hilariously enough -- in their own terms of use about using the materials on the site under fair use.

But that's beside your point, let's play a game. Pretend you have the floor in front of primary school students and you want to explain fair use. What do you say?

I'm not saying they shouldn't mention it. Because it's not well defined. Fair use is, in my opinion, an abomination in that it's a "law" that's not defined in anyway. And what's even better is when I try to cite the safe harbor laws or portion limits on Slashdot, I'm ridiculed over and over (not that I've ever practiced law but as a citizen it's the most I can find) despite my analysis being correct! So with my masters degree in computer science, I am clearly unable to pin down what precisely constitutes fair use and what does not. I imagine that were I charged with uploading and editing fair use samples of every song off of David Bowie's Hunky Dory album (which I did) that my innocence would depend entirely on how much money I have for a lawyer ... not the law. Because "fair use" is ambiguous and the so called "doctrine" is downright laughable. If you don't agree with me, go ahead and post a response arguing for or against my above Wikipedia edits being "fair use." I'll gladly play the devil's advocate if someone doesn't beat me to it.

So given the above information, would you please outline how you would explain this to children? Or how you plan to "win their hearts and souls" with the fair use doctrine?

What I want for Christmas: someone in my government to man up and bring any amount of clarity to copyright law, fair use and (while we're at it) patents. Something shouldn't be unclear until you've already been sued for doing it. That's how you find yourself in situations like the RIAA suing thousands of people and watching court case after court case resolve to millions in damages awarded from an average citizen to a huge conglomerate of lawyers and labels.

Re:Okay, You Have the Floor

[eldavojohn]

"You have the right to use small parts of something covered by copyright (like quoting a book for an essay) to comment on it, write a review about it or parody it and you're allowed to make copies for yourself to use."

So you're saying that if I take very small samples of The Beatles' White Album (as I consider the album an entire work) and make new songs out of those small samples, it is completely legal and I can distribute or sell said reconstructions because they are small parts or parodies? Do I need to merely include a comment on my "mashup" to make that legal?

Or if I take a single episode of the Family Guy (the whole series is what seven seasons now?) I can distribute that with my website with commentary on how it's great for society?

Re:Okay, You Have the Floor

[eldavojohn]

If you're actually doing some commentary on the pieces of the songs that you're using, then yes. And no, an episode of Family Guy is not a small piece - each episode is a standalone work.

Yeah well, I said that to illustrate a point in what is a complete work? Did you know that a single song can be recorded over hundreds of hours spent in a studio? Is each snippet of a track recorded a "complete work"? What about the post recording processing that goes on? You're using that too, you know.

I'm just trying to get you to think about the ways in which this whole fair use thing becomes ambiguous but apparently you can say what you feel like saying without quoting or citing one legal document or precedent ... and there you are at +5 informative. Great, keep teaching kids that.

Go ahead and tell us what fair use is, I'm not pretending to be a lawyer but you're doing a fine job.

As for my above post being moderated troll?! So much for discourse and discussion on nailing down the definition of "fair use." I cite Capitol Records chasing after the Grey Album and I'm the troll.

Why do I even waste my time putting together posts? I am so sick and tired of this site.

Re:Okay, You Have the Floor

[Bob9113]

So given the above information, would you please outline how you would explain this to children?

Step 1: Teach them critical thinking, instead of doctrine.

Step 2: There is no step 2.

Children should learn to think. With regard to controversial topics like copyright law or health care legislation, they should be encouraged to seek broad resources and to judge for themselves. They should never, under any circumstances, be indoctrinated into any belief. Not even beliefs about fair use, of which I am a rabid supporter.

Re:Okay, You Have the Floor

[DrgnDancer]

UK Gov't Health tells kids to masturbate;Parents are angry. But when you have a monopoly, customer opinions don't matter

Your sig and your post both present the same essential argument, and both suffer from the logical fallacy. I seriously doubt that the Uk government is telling kids to masturbate. I full believe and wouldn't even be surprised to hear that the UK government is telling kids something along the lines of "Current psychological research shows that masturbation is natural and/or healthy". The first is giving advice, the second merely stating a fact. Moreover the second is stating a TRUE fact. Whether or not you believe that masturbation is natural and/or healthy, the vast majority of current research shows that it is. Your moral judgment on the act itself cannot stand in the way of a simple statement on the current state of research *about* the act. You are perfectly free, at home, to tell your children that masturbation is a sin, and that they should not do it. The schools can, and should, present data about what the most current science on the matter says. Schools should not be in the business of teaching morals, but they are in the business of presenting scientific data to students.

The same fallacy applies to your post about what RIAA is doing. While what the RIAA curriculum is teaching might be counter to your moral beliefs (i.e. you may believe that all information should be free and copyright laws are an abomination), unless it is factually inaccurate it doesn't matter. Schools are again not in the business of presenting moral arguments, they are in the business of presenting facts. In this case legal facts. If the facts are wrong (and in this case is seem that they are, if not wrong, certainly biased) then we should object. If the facts are right, and the curriculum does not stray into making moral declarations, then the fact that we'd like those facts to be different doesn't change anything. Objecting based on the idea that we'd rather our children didn't hear these facts is silly.

Re:Okay, You Have the Floor

[cpt kangarooski]

Because it's not well defined. Fair use is, in my opinion, an abomination in that it's a "law" that's not defined in anyway.

It is deliberately left undefined. A fair use is an otherwise infringing use which, under the totality of the circumstances, is fair. There are tests to help determine fairness, and there are trends as to the sorts of things that often are fair or unfair, but ultimately it is meant to be a a way of handling minor, otherwise infringing acts which should be allowed in the spirit of copyright, rather than the letter of the law; and it is a way of handling unusual and unforeseen acts.

If you want specific exceptions for specific things, whether they are narrow or broad, that's fine, but then they should exist in addition to fair use, since they could never suffice to replace it.

Remember, both law and equity are part of our legal traditions; don't be surprised that fair use is rooted in the latter.

And what's even better is when I try to cite the safe harbor laws or portion limits on Slashdot, I'm ridiculed over and over (not that I've ever practiced law but as a citizen it's the most I can find) despite my analysis being correct!

Fair use has no such things. I'm sorry that you are upset when people point this out to you. The best people can manage with fair use is to look at a number of cases, and try to discern trends. But each fair use case being unique, trends are of limited utility. There have been cases where small amounts of material were quoted from a work, and it was not fair, and there have been cases where entire works have been copied, and it was fair.

If you're really interested in trying to know when a use is fair or not, I'd suggest learning the test and reading a number of the leading cases on fair use, including the recounting of the facts of the case, so you know just what the particular use happened to be. But this will only at best put you at the level of legal scholars, lawyers, judges, etc. who get it wrong fairly often. Courts have a hard time working out fair use, and reversals on appeal are not uncommon. It's just a difficult thing, and it can't be helped without destroying fair use in the process.

Again, I think you'd be much better off leaving fair use (and your criticisms of it) aside, and instead pushing for additional statutory exceptions which would avoid your having to rely on fair use for things you wanted to do, while still leaving it in place for those who did need to rely on it.

For example, I would like to see an exception that made any otherwise infringing act non-infringing (or at least non-actionable) if it was engaged in by a natural person, and was not commercial in nature or for profit, without affecting secondary liability. The idea being that Alice could engage in file sharing, but Bob could not run a torrent tracker that carried advertisements, or required a fee to access, nor could Carol require that people adhere to a particular ratio of uploads to downloads, nor could Dave sell the software used for this. Thus while we might reduce the amount of money that could be exploited from a particular copyright, at least about all the money there was to be had would still be funneled to the copyright holder. It also legitimizes a lot of what people are doing already, kind of like repealing Prohibition.

Re:Okay, You Have the Floor

[Late Adopter]

I feel like you are on some level being disingenuous here. Fair Use is intentionally ambiguous, since it is a question of spirit, not just enumerating that which is permitted. Pretending that distributing whole tracks or episodes of a show, even with your own work on top of it, doesn't excessively advantage from the work the original artists put into it, to score pedant points, borders on intentionally naive.

The law is the best reference for this. 17 USC 107 lists the four factors to test, and gives illustrative (and not exclusive) examples to show what the purpose behind the doctrine is. If you are trying to do something that uses the work as a basis, you probably have a problem. If you are trying to merely talk about the work, and use small snippets of it to that end, you are probably ok. And then copying your own copies for your own exclusive purposes is ok.

Parody gets a little tougher to talk about, since the case-law makes the distinction that what is meant is critical parody (which makes sense, given that it fits the pattern of the permitted classes), and not parody as a back-door to making a derivative work (in the Weird-Al sense). Note that Fair Use is not unique here: like any case that wanders too close to the boundaries of the law, you have to take it to a courtroom to know for sure. Wikipedia offers Mattel, Inc. v. Walking Mountain Productions and Art Rogers v. Jeff Koons as cases to reference.

Re:Okay, You Have the Floor

[amicusNYCL]

making copies for personal use and then playing them while your friends come over is illegal

This sounds like FUD to me (courtesy of "selven", apparently). Here's one of the "activities" in one of the PDFs:

Take a look at these scenarios. See if you can spot the songlifters who are breaking the copyright law...

Caitlin wants to listen to music as much as possible. She copies all the music she buys online onto blank CDs so she can listen to her music when her friends come over to play. And she transfers the music she buys on CD onto her MP3 player so she can listen to her music when driving in the car with her family.

Caitlin is not a songlifter because personal use is permitted when music fans buy their music. Caitlin can copy her music onto her hard drive and her MP3 player. Caitlin can even burn a CD with her own special mix of music she has purchased.

I'd like to see a reference on where they say that it's illegal to play your music for your friends. That's specifically what I'm trying to find in the PDFs, I think that claim by TFS is false.

Of course, this entire "program" seems like a nightmare to sit through. Look at this stuff, in the teacher's guide:

Write the word songlifting on the chalk-board and ask students what they think it means.

*raise hand* I know! That's a word that was made up by a shady corporate lobby.

Have students conduct the survey [to find out who they know is a "songlifter"] as home- work, emphasizing that they should only collect information, not names. Use the chalkboard to compile their findings and investigate trends. For example: Which is the most common type of songlifting? Which age group has the most songlifters? Have students use the results of their survey to determine whether or not songlifting is a serious problem.

So Billy, do you download songs? Oh yeah, what do you use? I haven't heard of that one, I should check it out. For research, I mean.

Next, draw the copyright symbol on the
chalkboard. Ask if students know what this
symbol means and where they might have seen
it

I weep for our nation's schoolchildren..

How about rewards?

[garyisabusyguy]

Surely the riaa can take a lesson from the war on drugs and get the children to turn in their parents and friends for dmca violations!

I mean c'mon wouldn't it be worth it to any kid to receive a free cd (with rootkit) for sending their parents, friends, neighbors and relatives to the slammer?

It should be okay for the kids

[croftj]

As long as the President didn't come up with it!

Really?

[ZekoMal]

So, instead of funding some better early introductions to sex-ed, better science classes, better...everything, we're expecting public schools to waste time telling kids not to burn disks?

I mean, I'll play devil's advocate for a just a second: It didn't stop them from smoking, so why the hell do you think it'll stop them from doing a far easier to do "crime"?!

When I was in elementary school

[johnny cashed]

We were taught to share. Guess those chickens came home to roost eh?

Re:Is it like Sex Ed can I opt my Kid Out

[Homr Zodyssey]

As a parent of a school-aged kid I can tell you that this is not how it works. They don't send home a letter telling you they're teaching polynomials, evolution or T.S. Elliot.

However, they are VERY sensitive to potential lawsuits. Angry parents standing in the school office tend to get their way, regardless of the logic of their arguments. Stay involved. Ask your kids' teachers about the subjects they will be taught. Go to PTA meetings.

The parents who sit around waiting for letters to be sent home to them are the parents who have no say in how the school is run.

Re:The emperor is naked!

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Children are best at spotting when the emperor is naked.

I see what you're saying, but you're wrong. Children are horrible at spotting that.

Look at drug education, which is taught in a similarly shrill tone. Almost all children come out of that with an absolute hatred of any drugs. It's not until later, when exposed to the actual effects that some of them will realize that most of what was taught was bunk. Many will have the extremely negative reaction that they were taught for the rest of their lives, regardless of any evidence they receive to the contrary. And even those that do figure out that it was mostly hysteria that they were taught generally fling in the other direction, rebelling against any authority and expecting everything they say to be a lie.

Teaching unbalanced and hysterical lessons to young children, who do not have BS filters in place, is as far as I've seen, universally harmful. I can think of no situation where a reasoned explanation of the facts, and clearly marked explanation of theories, would not be better than the above.

Raising good Corperate Consumer citizens....

[Lumpy]

Sharing? that's bad, Stop sharing with billy.

and children, you do know that you kill kittens when you share? Also you are being very bad if you sing a song you heard on the radio without paying for the right to do so?

yes billy, your mother is a criminal for singing "happy birthday" to you yesterday. She is evil and should be put away.

you know kids, it's up to you to watch your parents and report any suspicious or bad behavior.

Re:What's wrong with teaching?

[itsdapead]

But illegal downloading really IS stealing.

No it isn't: Illegal downloading is copyright infringement - it may be against the law, but it has nothing to do with theft. In other news, dropping litter is not assault with a deadly weapon, and shoplifting is not murder.

Dropping gum on the sidewalk is reprehensible behaviour, but we don't call it "attempted shoe homicide" and send people to the Big Chair for it.

Last time I looked, the only religion which included "Thou shalt not infringe copyright" in its commandments was Scientology.

That's the problem: there's nothing wrong with teaching kids the facts about copyright. The problem is with teaching kids industry propaganda about copyright which exagerates its seriousness, and is really about vested interests trying to maintain control of the industry in an age when most musicians would do better by givimng away music and making their money from gigs and t-shirts.

RIAA Math

[Jason Levine]

Ok, kids. Settle down. Today in RIAA Math, we're going to learn how to calculate damages from online piracy. Let's say Billy here has shared a song online. Now, we don't know exactly how many people downloaded it so we'll just take a random guess: Fifty million. Now the intellectual property value of that song is $100,000 so...

Yes, Susie? No, just because the song sells on iTunes for $0.99 doesn't mean it's "intellectual property value" is $0.99. Remember, we're talking about "intellectual property value", not "commercial market value."

Anyway, the intellectual property value of that song is $100,000 so Billy now owes the RIAA Fifty million times $100,000, or... Anyone? Right, Thomas. $5 trillion.

Now, best estimates by the RIAA Association of Piracy Estimations are that there are twenty million people like Billy. Since each Billy damages the RIAA by $5 trillion, how much does all online piracy damage the RIAA? Very good, Melissa. $100 quintillion.

Everyone get's an A.... What, Susie? No, those figures aren't worthless. No, I didn't just pluck numbers from out of thin air. World GDP is $60 trillion? Susie, you've obviously been reading some non-RIAA approved materials. See me after class. Everyone else is dismissed.

*lifting

[Dalzhim]

Shoplifting = stealing from a shop Songlifting = copying a song without paying for that copy Weightlifting = stealing weights from a gym Facelifting = stealing someone's look/style Lambdalifting = stealing variables from a function etc.