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California Elementary Schools To Test Anti-Piracy Curriculum
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.”
It's worked for years with every other product...
Get them while they're young and you'll have a "___________" (insert appropriate noun here) for life... Customer, slave, zealot, etc...
The only problem is that government is allowing corporations to push their agenda in the classroom... It wasn't enough to have it at the beginning of every one of their Disney movies --you know, the ones that kids watch ad infinitum, now they're allowed to spread their FUD in the schools, too! Yay!
How long before we see "Lunch! Sponsored by McDonald's", etc...
That's not the only issue at play here...
The backers for this program (RIAA/MPAA) are all wealthy, so their kids will never see these things in school. They'll be free from the propaganda and allowed to be creative and free. But, not the common man, because he can't afford freedom...
Hrmm... I wonder if that's how this is supposed to work... Freedom for those that can afford it...
Makes me wonder if there'll ever be a Star Trek-esque Utopia...
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
Most family's are forced to send there child to public schools by there circumstances. What idiot is letting a private organization force propaganda on them DARE was bad enough.
No sir I dont like it.
Maybe it would be better to pay religions to convince the faithful that they will be tortured in Hell for copying things. Religions have a lot more experience with this kind of thing. I mean, WWJD? Would he download that torrent? Really? (Ignoring the incident with the money changer's tables for a moment.)
with beginning grad students. In papers, they often feel like they have to cite every . last . factual . assertion . and . word . that . they . use, to the point of having paragraphs with 20 citations in them, unreadable. But they're so terrified of "plagiarism" and heard that lecture so many times at the beginning of so many classes that it's hard to talk them out of citing Pythagorus or some writing about him when using the Pythagorean theorem, Perskyi when using the word "television," and so on. Exhausting.
As an analog to this, they often hesitate to say anything new (i.e. anything they can't find a citation for). It's as though they feel like only institutions and the famous have license to make new things in the world, and then be cited. It recalls for me the similar divide between creators/consumers, with a hard territorial border in between the two camps, that RIAA/MPAA/BSA et. al. have tried to inculcate into the cultural consciousness.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Science is about copying. Civilization is about copying. Human culture, and maybe even what is being human is about copying. We would never be where we are if a lot of people weren't standing on the shoulders of giants. Denying copying is worse than asking to reinvent the wheel each time, is forbidding to invent or use it because someone else have the exclusive rights over a basic, common sense idea.
If you want to define intellectual property stealing, is taking exclusivity over an idea, not letting anyone to have it, no matter how common sense, how easy is to get there (i.e. adding "on internet", "on mobile" or "on computer" to common activities to patent it) or how indepently other people get it.
And doing that in the current scenario where the US government is blatantly copying whatever US citizens and the rest of the people of the entire planet do, write, and create is to consider people retards and saying it aloud.
If any teacher in the California public school system has even an ounce of self-respect, they will refuse to teach such skewed bullshit to their students.
Skewed how, you might ask? from TFA:
[The Internet Keep Safe Coalition's] president, Marsali Hancock, says fair use is not a part of the teaching material because K-6 graders don’t have the ability to grasp it.
That's not teaching.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese