Tuesday 4:52pm (22nd September 2009)
RIAA recruiting kids to ignore their rights, rat on friends, and regurgitate industry propaganda..The EFF comment on Recording Industry Association of America's teaching materials for students, say that "the RIAA tells kids, "Never copy someone else's creative work without permission from the copyright holder" — omitting the important right to make creative fair use of existing content. It also coins a misleading term, "songlifting," (which the curriculum says is "just as bad as shoplifting"). Perhaps most disturbing of all given that the curriculum is supposed to be adopted by schools, it teaches kids bad math as part of its lessons on peer to peer file-sharing. [...] Fortunately, teachers looking to educate their students about copyright have an alternative: Teaching Copyright, EFF's unbiased, informative and fact-centered copyright curriculum. Rather than bombarding kids with the message that using new technology is illegal, Teaching Copyright helps kids to understand their digital rights, giving them the information they need to responsibly create, critique and participate in the Internet's participatory mash-up culture."
