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MPAA Backs Anti-Piracy Curriculum For Elementary School Students
An anonymous reader writes "A number of groups, including the MPAA, are pushing to educate elementary school kids about the dangers of piracy. From the article: 'A nonprofit group called the Center for Copyright Information, which is supported by the MPAA and other groups, has commissioned a school curriculum to teach elementary-age children about the value of copyrights. The proposed curriculum is still in draft stage, but it's already taking flak. Some critics say the curriculum promotes the biased agenda of Hollywood studios and music labels. Others contend it would use up valuable classroom time when U.S. public schools are already struggling to teach the basics.'"
I respectfully submit a request to change the tag on this story from "education" to "indoctrination".
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It isn't nice to share your toys, you're stealing money that the toy manufacturers deserve when your friend Johnny doesn't buy his own toy!
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Submitter must have pirated the previous submission!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
This is just like the pharmaceutical industry funding D.A.R.E..
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Why don't we start with the fact that Hollywood was founded as it was about as far from New York and their IP laws about the movie industry as you could get in those days? Let's make sure we cover the theft of material from the public domain for corporate use too.
Don't forget to cover the MPAA's own history of corruption. The RIAA should not be forgotten either, they have a long history of ripping of artists and we need to make sure we educate people on that. We should have a special section on Hollywood accounting that covers how you have a billion dollar blockbuster that costs $100 million to make and officially loses money. Make sure that we cover how this works in the music industry too.
I also think it is important that people are educated on all of their rights that have been trampled and attempted to be circumvented by the **AA's and their like kind organizations overseas. By all means we should show the **AA's support of taking away your rights for a fair trial if your accused of copyright infringement. Don't forget to educate people on treaties and what they have done to take away your rights by treaty.
Don't forget to cover public domain and the history of extending how long something will last before being put into public domain. We also need to show how this has changed over the years. Libraries, those bastions of piracy! They have the audacity to lend IP without people paying for them fresh every single time, let's make sure we cover the history of trying to shut down libraries abilities to do lend things.
Anything else that we should educate people on?
Religious people can opt-out their children when it comes to evolution and sex-education. Seems only fair that parents get the option to opt their children out of this unabashed intrusion of the classroom by media corporations. From an economic educational standpoint, I don't want my kids learning that having the right political connections can be used to compensate for a broken business model.
Justification-- for downloading? No, you have it backwards. Natural law is the justification. Copying should not be a crime, copying should be encouraged because it is good for us all. Rather, those who seek to block us all from using our technology are the ones who should justify their position.
We've all heard their justifications. They claim that poor starving artists can't make money without copyright, that copyright is the only way or only fair way to compensate artists. They are wrong. How can they ask that we all forego the enormous flowering of cooperation and culture that the Internet, computers, hard drives, writable optical media, and flash drives has made possible? We could have the entire Library of Congress online, for free downloading, without risking a single precious physical copy. We could have research that we already paid for freely available. That perhaps is the most galling of all, that these thieves of our most valuable works, works of science that are important for our future and which we already pay for through grants, really believe they should have the right to lock it all away behind paywalls.
You should also recall their history. The media moguls fought the player piano, AM radio, cassette tape, VCR, and DAT, to name a few of the big ones. Their business grew despite the losses they suffered. No, these guys have shown that they aren't friends of art and artists, they are public enemies seeking control and rent monies that they do not deserve.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"