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California Elementary Schools To Test Anti-Piracy Curriculum

Posted by timothy on from the if-I-can-control-the-textbooks dept.

New submitter newbie_fantod writes "Ignoring the fact that the surest way to get a child to do something is to tell them not to, the RIAA and MPAA have developed an anti-piracy curriculum for kindergarten through grade 6. The pilot project is scheduled for testing in California schools later this year." Mitch Stoltz, an EFF attorney, isn't impressed: “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.”

4 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Indoctrination and Propoganda by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "It's worked for years with every other product..."

    Not always. DARE, despite being only incrementally less popular than apple pie and jesus, consistently turns in effectiveness numbers somewhere between 'useless' and 'teaches impressionable children about cool drugs that they should try' whenever some killjoy stops taking its effectiveness on faith and tries studying it.

  2. Re:Indoctrination and Propoganda by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    DARE... It's a great program... Just poorly marketed...

    What? I think you got it backwards. The marketing must be great, because it's still in use all over. But it is a terribly ineffective program, as has been shown repeatedly.

  3. Re:School == Copying by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Indeed. The whole idea of IP defies basic notions of cultural inheritance and evolution. I get that it might be useful for a limited time, but any extended period of time begins to subvert the very processes that lead to innovation.

    But this is what you get when you let sociopaths run the economy. The kinds of people who reaches the upper tiers of governance and corporate power are the kinds of people we should be locking away.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  4. Re:School == Copying by idontgno · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Science is about copying.

    "If I have seen further it is by paying my proper license fees to stand on the shoulders of giants."

    -- Sir Isaac Newton, according to next year's California standard textbooks about science

    --
    Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.