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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.”
Teach them how to use a VPN
love is just extroverted narcissism
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
First, count your blessings that you have a son who respects rules, even perhaps in this case when he really doesn't have to.
Second, call the school and complain that it's mega-stupid that they disallow iPads when their own online library app allows you to check out books in the iPad-supported format.
Third, although you may be able to make your own legal copy, can you get someone else's bootleg copy and call it legal? Seems to me that that was Napster's business model. Where are they now?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
Well, that is totally unreasonable and there might even be some legal cause of action there. That ONE kind of eBook-reader should be disallowed but not another that was previously allowed. Time to contact someone who can do things at the school, make the complaint, and such, Or pull the kid from that school and send them somewhere that doesn't have a Luddite administration.
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.
Arguing that you feel the current legal framework is unfair is not the way to make someone believe you, now is it?
Well, Technically it is a gray area. If you own the print copy of the book you can use a version that someone else scanned or converted to PDF and gave to you, and it's likely claimable fair use for you to use the extra copy for your own personal usage only ---- Any person who uploaded or shared the bootleg version probably did something illegal, but not you.
My suggestion would be to get advice from an attorney.... then you can tell your kid "Copyright law has some complicated exceptions called fair use, and only a professional lawyer is qualified to fully advise on a defensible position for certain actions; Upon the advise from my lawyer I am legally in the clear (or not) to download and use a bootleg copy of the same book I already purchased for my own personal use, as long as I don't further redistribute, share it, or copy it.".
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.
This Oatmeal Comic might be a good place to start.
_My_ kids saw me spending weeks Ripping all my DVD's & CD's so that we could watch/listen without having to search for waylaid disks (as in why is this CD in this case & where is the disk that was supposed to be here. As I continued to buy new physical content and just backed it up to digital storage, they could see that the objective was NOT to rip-off the authors but to digitize what we purchase.
DRM on EBooks is the main reason I either purchase content that is already non-DRM encumbered or, If I cannot find it without DRM, I purchase it in a DRM scheme that has been broken (Kindle eBooks) & convert the DRM'ed content to a non-encumbered format (EPubs with Calibre. I then delete the DRM encumbered copy.
Apple's Fairplay not having been broken, it's DRM makes it impossible to do so, so I don't buy eBooks through Apple.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Watch this episode of The Brittas Empire (which is itself illegally offered for free viewing on Youtube, incidentally - oh the irony) and your son will learn all there is to know about copyright.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Copyright is a pure (artificial and arbitrary) product of capitalism. Socialism is the library. You're just brainwashed by the western propaganda as his kid is.
I have music I bought on 8 track (Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Led Zep, UFO), then bought the album (my music buying exploded about this time, an album a week), then in some cases bought the CD. I have some 3500 CDs. It's easier to download the MP3 of a CD I own than it is to dig through boxes in a closet, find the CD, and rip it myself. Have I broken copyright law? I'm sure the MAFIAA will say HELL YES!, but I'm not so sure. Where is the line? Own the CD, download the MP3? Own the LP, download the MP3? Own the 8-track, download the MP3?
:"A better sounding format".
IMHO, I bought the IP already. To me I'm not breaking any laws. Those who get money from the buying of 8-tracks->LPs->cassettes->CDs think otherwise. I think they're thinking is greedy and they need to cut back on the coke and hookers they consume.
Copyright law is about sucking as much $$$ out of people as it can, not what is right.
We won't even get into the CDs that sounded worse than the LPs. *cough* Nektar - Remember the future, *cough* Black Sabbath - Paranoid, *cough* I can come up with dozens of other examples where they rushed out a CD that sounded like crap cuz, well, people wanted their LPs on
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 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.
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
do you have any data/study that demonstrate kids exposed to social world of a real world community, including among other things, "church, sports, and social field trips" etc, are less exposed to reality, than kids who grow up in extremely juvenile social world of american public high school(an artificial world of recent construction, very different from "real" world")?
also , given the snow-flaky behavior of kids coming who come out of public schools, who loudly, and sometimes violently, demand they want to to be protected from ideas that conflict with dominant establishment "liberal" ideology, there is enough proof, that contrary to what you say, brainwashing and inability to deal with reality is definitely a public school thing. whether it is also home school thing is yet to be demonstrated.
There are a lot nuances to this.
You could explain that illegal is not necessarily immoral, especially in a case where you've paid for the content.
You could encourage him to choose books from authors who don't publish with DRM, which is probably the best way for any individual to influence the market. But won't get him this book and is probably over his head.
Or you could just put the book on his Kindle and not tell him how you did it, since it sounds like he's going to drop a dime on you if you tell him you downloaded it. Maybe download 1984 for him while you're at it.
9. Explain the Sony Betamax suit that those producers lost allowing people to "time shift" and how this is an extension of that same decision.
10. Explain the concepts of the public domain and why that is the sole reason for the existence of copyright.
11. Explain how those producers lobbied (read bribed) legislators to extend copyright to the point that nothing will be released to the public domain in his lifetime.
12. Explain that the DMCA was created by those same politicians in the same manor as the extensions to try and prevent format shifting.
13. Explain what the definition of greed is (on both sides of this issue).
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
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.
I was raised in a (professionally) political family. That meant that as a kid, I understood that it was my parents' job to write or change laws. Laws can change. Some laws are bad. Some laws used to be good, and now aren't. Most of the rules and laws we actually interact with are local. Many more people work on local laws than state or national laws. That's a good place to start.
Next, morality. Your son has good moral instincts. Don't discourage that! Generally, you shouldn't do anything you don't want other people knowing about. If you have to keep it secret to keep being who you want to be, don't do it.
Finally, breaking the rules. Sometimes you find you need to break a rule. You know that something is right, and you don't care what society or the law says about it. In that case, you need to be ready to accept the consequences.
In this case, what are the consequences of violating copyright laws? What are the consequences of violating the school rules? Why are you more willing to violate a federal law than a school rule? (As a parent, I know that my child will be punished for me breaking a school rule. In that situation, I'm also happy to try to take any consequences myself.) These are good lessons on how society actually works.
My best advice to you is that you have your strongest voice as a citizen in local government, which includes your school. Teach your child to engage in a productive way with government by example. Don't simply accept what the government is telling you to do. That's not how our system is supposed to work. The solution here is to get your school to change their rules. Start with a teacher, then the principle, then up from there.
Copyright is an artificial monopoly enforced by the State. Nothing at all to do with capitalism. (Unless you meant "crony capitalism", a.k.a. "corporatism", which isn't the same thing at all.)
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
You have to talk to their in their own language.
Disclaimer: My kids attend public school, but I supplement that with plenty of learning at home (rockets, robots, programming, explosives, etc.).
Are you homeschooling them or preparing them for war?
My children are at this same age, asking similar questions.
To 'explain copyright', first you will need to know your own goal.
Are you trying to teach your son how to comply with the law? Or, are you trying to teach your son how to recognize when a bad law is being used to make society poorer?
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Referencing "gay marriage" is taking a side.
Australia just legalized "gay marriage." How do you cover that event without mentioning "gay marriage"? "Australia just passed a law... We won't say exactly what it is, because we don't want to take a side. Anyway, that's what they're out celebrating. Their new law that shall not be named."
Affirmative action is discrimination.
Well, now we know your side. Let's hope the teachers are more balanced than you.
Illegal immigration is illegal, so there is no other side.
Again, we can infer your side. The question of what to do with people who live here without legal status has no obvious, indisputable answer. There is certainly more than one side.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Knowledge of rockets and explosives would be useful in the public school I went to.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.