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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!"
Industry trade groups have no fucking business writing curriculum for children.
These assholes are of the impression the own everything, and that all of our laws and rights are subject to their approval.
Whatever idiot in the education system decided that indoctrinating children to the viewpoint of corporations should fired.
I can almost bet this will have things which are an incorrect interpretation of the law as it exists, and is nothing more than corporate propaganda.
This is the problem with America, whatever a company wants is considered right and good -- even when it's bullshit.
Is it really the case that you have companies and special interest groups creating the curriculum for your children?
How do you, as parents stand for this? You do know that you can go to the school board and freak out right? I think step 1 would be to organize a district wide freakout on the school board. Step 2, private school.
The Don't Copy That Floppy campaign has been a marvelous success. Floppy disk piracy is now down 100%. Cali can expect similar success with their initiative.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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.
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.
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
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