Slashdot reports on a plan by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a group dedicated to preventing the illegal use of software, to educate American schoolchildren about copyright by distributing comic books through Weekly Reader. The short comics will include their cartoon mascot, a 'copyright-crusading ferret,' who will be named in an online contest. And your tax dollars are paying for it.
The Cyber-Crime and Intellectual Property Theft Prevention and Education Project is a United States Department of Justice funded initiative to educate the public on cyber-crime and intellectual property theft. One of the key initiatives of this project is to develop educational tools designed to reach school-age children. The Business Software Alliance, in partnership with the Hamilton Fish Institute at the George Washington University, is the executor of the project.
The website for this campaign includes such gems as the 'Cyber-Ethics Champion Code [PDF]' and the exciting Shockwave game "Deep Freeze:"
Stop the pirates from freezing the city. Throw your ball into the pirates and their stolen software before they hit the ground.
So software pirates are evil, and it is reasonable to use violence to stop them. Alas, such 'copyright education' inanity is not contained to the States. A similar program, based on 'music education' has been unrolled in the United Kingdom.
In other Slashdot news, the Congressional Budget Office released a study on American copyright legislation, suggesting that current laws should not be revised in favor of either producers or consumers.
At 1:37 on August 12, 2004, Margaret wrote:
I just have to point out that your post misspells copyright as both "copytight" and "copright"-- I think copytight has a nice ring to it, don't you? Cause that's exactly what they're trying to do-- keep a tight hold on copyright. I was discussing copyright with Sam yesterday, and we agree that the music industry isn't losing CD sales because of pirating-- they're losing sales because the CD is becoming outdated as a medium. I mean, how many people do you know who don't immediately upload songs to their computer as soon as they buy a CD?
At 2:27 on August 12, 2004, Martey wrote:
Thanks for pointing out my "Freudian" spelling errors. I agree with you on the CD thing (although I do like lyric booklets), but worry about its implications. With the advent of "online music services" like iTunes and the increasing popularity of MP3 players, people are becoming tied into certain formats. If you use iTunes, you either have an iPod as your MP3 player, or you are forced to re-encode all of your music (resulting in a slight reduction of quality). The problem is even worse with WMA-based services, many of which do not allow you to burn your music to CD. What I think would be cool is a music service that allowed you to choose the format you wished to download. That way, you could choose any format you wished, even opting for an uncompressed format like WAV if you wished to burn a CD.
At 2:47 on August 12, 2004, Martey wrote:
One more thing. One notable difference between software piracy and music piracy is that software prices are much, much higher than music. While Adobe and some other companies charge higher prices for their software, I think Microsoft would be the simplest example, as the money that the company makes from Windows and Office funds all of their other endeavors. As you can guess, the cost of making these programs is much lower than their prices. It is impossible to accept the BSA's claims that software piracy is causing programmers to starve.