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Ask Slashdot: How Do I Explain Copyright To My Kids?
orgelspieler writes: My son paid for a copy of a novel on his iPad. When his school made it against the rules to bring iPads, he wanted to get the same book on his Kindle. I tried to explain that the format of his eBook was not readily convertible to the Kindle. So he tried to go on his schools online library app. He checked it out just fine, but ironically, the offline reading function only works on the now-disallowed iPads. Rather than paying Amazon $7 for a book I already own, and he has already checked out from the library, I found a bootleg PDF online. I tried to explain that he could just read that, but he freaked out. "That's illegal, Dad!" I tried to explain format shifting, and the injustice of the current copyright framework in America. Even when he did his own research, stumbling across EFF's website on fair use, he still would not believe me.
Have any of you fellow Slashdotters figured out a good way to navigate the moral, legal, and technological issues of copyright law, as it relates to the next generation of nerds? Interestingly, my boy seems OK with playing old video games on the Wayback Machine, so I don't think it's a lost cause.
Have any of you fellow Slashdotters figured out a good way to navigate the moral, legal, and technological issues of copyright law, as it relates to the next generation of nerds? Interestingly, my boy seems OK with playing old video games on the Wayback Machine, so I don't think it's a lost cause.
Perhaps your son should explain copyright to you.
You started too late. You should have taught him what you wanted him to know before his teachers taught him what the RIAA and MPAA wanted him to know.
Also, you didn't format shift it, you downloaded it, and that download was not fair use.
The good news is that I don't think you did anything illegal. Copyright infringement involves making a copy without a license to make copies, which you did not do, and could not do, since you didn't have a copy in the first place.
Now, if you made a copy of the copy you downloaded, that might be something you could be sued for. But it isn't illegal unless you are making unlicensed copies commercially.
See that "Preview" button?
You need to figure out why your son is a better person and more respectful of peoples' copyrights than you are.
Or.. as someone earlier posited: Maybe you should ask your son to explain copyrights to you.
It's actually pretty brief and clear:
Article I Section 8. Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
I'm still trying to figure out why your kid's school doesn't allow them to bring an iPad to school but will let them bring a Kindle...
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
The most important skill and experience you take away from public school is the ability to deal with the public.
Homeschooled kids lose out on that big time, and no, your church, sports, and social field trips you organize with other homeschooled kids is not a substitute.
If you are worried about the education get a tutor and do some homework with the kid, but 8 hours a day learning reading, writing, social studies, math, and science from Mom & Dad doesn't prepare them for any sort of real world.
And don't forget that you brainwash your kids too, just with the ideas and beleifs you hold. Public school for all its flaws, exposes them to other ideas, some good, some bad... and frankly the fact that he is intelligently debating with his kid about the ethics of copyright is probably the best possible outcome.
Copyright's are easy to explain and understand. You don't copy stuff that you didn't produce yourself, without permission.
Fair use laws... That's the problem here. They don't make sense to the average person.
So... I can buy an MP3 of a song and play it in my house, in my car, privately all day long, but I cannot play it in public or use it in my business... Except if my business use is considered "fair Use". So I can play this song as a background for my Christmas light display, for the public, as long as I'm not charging admission or being paid for it. I can play the song in a church service, but I may not broadcast that song or distribute recordings of the song being played in the service without a license. I can write a review of the song, even including a small portion of the song in my review, but I may not play the entire song...
Then there is the whole Internet bastion of sites like U-Tube where you seemingly can do anything you want with the song, including splicing in other copyrighted material (video, pictures and the like) without any permission, but only because U-Tube is paying the license fees for you, unless they don't, or you distribute your material some other way... Unless it is considered public domain in the first place because the artist has been dead long enough.
I can understand how kids would be confused by all this...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The first step is to demonstrate that what is legal and what is moral are not coextensive. Once one understands that the law is at best a compromise, and its formation subject to the whims of the powerful, typically preserving, if not aggravating, the divisions in our societies, then copyright makes perfect sense.
Well son, a long time ago, here in the US, some very smart people decided to give the government the power to tell its citizens that making copies of other people's work is illegal. The intent was to make sure that ideas weren't stolen and sold under someone else's name. They called this power "copyright" and it had a time limit of fourteen years. Every time this time limit was set to expire, however, the government extended this time limit longer, and longer, and longer, and expanded what it meant more and more. Twenty-eight years ago the government gave everything ever made an automatic copyright. Twenty-five years ago the government made copyright permanent. Twenty-one years ago the government greatly expanded what copyright could prevent you from doing in addition to prohibiting copies.
It is illegal to do anything more than watch, listen to, or play things that are copyrighted, which is everything, forever. (Pause) Does that sound ridiculous to you? My only advice to you about copyright is don't get caught.
The most important skill and experience you take away from public school is the ability to deal with the public.
Homeschooled kids lose out on that big time
Can you cite any evidence that this is true? With five minutes of googling I located research that found homeschoolers equally or slightly better socialized, according to several different metrics, and none that found they were worse.
Homeschooled kids lose out on that big time, and no, your church, sports, and social field trips you organize with other homeschooled kids is not a substitute.
So let me get this straight. Starting in public Middle/Jr High school preteens begin to be stratified into caste systems and are socialized by peers that they âoecannotâ accept those one year or two years under them. Middle and high school students spend the majority of their time in a fixed location away from the âoepublic.â Meanwhile kids being homeschooled and participating in coops are socializing with a wide variety of pre teens and teens regardless of their year in school. The homeschoolers are also out and about in the âoepublicâ and can actually have a conversation with a adults.
These are good suggestions. As a copyright lawyer, I'd add:
Fourth, do not, as a layperson, try to teach another layperson anything about copyright. Nobody actually understands this stuff, nobody has read a recent case in the field, and nobody can keep straight any sound legal advice from what they read on places like slashdot. Then proceed to do what you want, as nobody goes after the little fish.
> Fourth, do not, as a layperson, try to teach another layperson anything about copyright.
Go fuck youself. Our civil society and its foundations are not the exclusive domain of some jumped up pricks who charge for access. The concepts are easy to understand, what is less so is the deliberate poisoning of principles by a bunch of self entitled fucks and the layers of shit you have provided.