It's not enough for these telecoms to spy on us for the government. Now they're writing our kids' textbooks to protect their profits.
Listen up children: Cheating on your homework or cribbing notes from another student is bad, but not as bad as sharing a music track with a friend, or otherwise depriving the content-industry of its well-earned profits.
That’s one of the messages in a new school curriculum being developed with the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the nation’s top ISPs, in a pilot project to be tested in California elementary schools later this year.
Several versions of the curriculum, for
grades one, two, five and six, have been released to the public. If successful, the curriculum is expected to be further introduced on a national level.
For those who need a refresher, RIAA is the trade organization responsible for suing individuals who used Napster and other file file-sharing services to download free music. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
On September 8, 2003, the recording industry sued 261 American music fans for sharing songs on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks, kicking off an unprecedented legal campaign against the people that should be the recording industry’s best customers: music fans.1 Five years later, the recording industry has filed, settled, or threatened legal actions against at least 30,000 individuals.2 These individuals have included children, grandparents, unemployed single mothers, college professors—a random selection from the millions of Americans who have used P2P networks. And there’s no end in sight; new lawsuits are filed monthly, and now they are supplemented by a flood of "pre-litigation" settlement letters designed to extract settlements without any need to enter a courtroom.
In other words, just the type of people you want to stick their noses into your kid's elementary school curriculum.
The Curriculum is being developed by the California School Library Association in cooperation with the "Internet Keep Safe" coalition and the "Center for Copyright Information," made up, in part, by the same corporate behemoths (Google, Verizon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.) responsible for freely sharing our private "data" with the government. The irony of their message here, however, appears to have been lost on them:
In the sixth-grade version, (.pdf) teachers are asked to engage students with the question: “In school, if we copy a friend’s answers on a test or homework assignment, what happens?”
The answer is, you can be suspended from school or flunk the test. The teachers are directed to tell their students that there are worse consequences if they commit a copyright violation.
“In the digital world, it’s harder to see the effects of copying, even though the effects can be more serious,” the teacher worksheet says.
Essentially what the entire curriculum does is find various ways to paint file-sharing as criminal, with repeated insistence that "if someone else created it, you need permission to use it." The concept of Fair Use is
never mentioned in the curriculum, purportedly because
it's too difficult for kids to understand. Instead, kids are simply told that using without permission is "stealing." Cloying messages with child actors bemoaning the effects of copyright infringement on their "songwriter" or "programmer" parents are used in the
videos accompanying the course materials.
Evidently the thinking here is to indoctrinate children from a young age (the curriculum runs from first through sixth grade, introducing new "concepts" at each level) so as to thwart behavior that might impact the profits of "the nation's top ISP's," as well as the multitude of corporations that make up the motion picture and music industries. Teachers are provided "talking points" and materials that emphasize the downright evil nature of copying another's work. One problem is that some of the information is flat-out wrong:
The fifth-grade lesson introduces the Creative Commons license, in which rights holders grant limited permission on re-use. But even in explaining the Creative Commons, the lesson says that it’s illegal to make any copies of copyrighted works. That’s a message that essentially says it’s even unlawful to rip CDs to your iPod.
As the
Guardian puts it:
It’s no surprise to learn that America’s biggest internet service providers – let’s call them the Telecom Cartel, since that’s what they’ve become – are part of this propaganda scheme. It’s sad to learn, however, that the California School Library Association has climbed aboard; the organization helped produce the lessons that, thankfully, are still only in draft form. But they are likely to reach California classrooms later this school year and, presumably, other parts of the nation later on.
Here's an excerpt from the draft lesson for second graders.
We are all creators at some level. We hope others will respect our work and follow what we decide to allow with our photos, art, movies, etc. And we ‘play fair’ with their work too. We are careful to acknowledge the work of authors and creators and respect their ownership. We recognize that it’s hard work to produce something, and we want to get paid for our work.
I have no problem understanding complaints about piracy, and I was never a fan or user of Napster. I have several friends who are musicians and I understand there are legitimate and widespread problems with piracy and those problems can and do impact their ability to make a living. But I'd have less trouble sympathizing with legitimate claims of property interests were the folks creating this "curriculum" not the
same people who
blithely consented and abetted the government's domestic spying on all of us. Somehow the "concern" about respecting what people may have "authored and created" got lost in the mix when the NSA showed up at the door. Perhaps that's because the "content" in those circumstances added no value to their bottom line.
Of course, the argument is that the industry is protecting individual commercial interests here, not private communications. But that raises an even bigger problem--why are schools teaching this stuff in the first place? What mathematics, science, literature, civics course are being shunted aside to make room for this blatant exercise in commercial self-inoculation? Does the fact that a commercial interest feels itself threatened justify intrusion into the educational curriculum? The most offensive aspect of this is the clumsily-hidden emphasis on self-serving corporate interests in the guise of providing actual educational content:
“This thinly disguised corporate propaganda is inaccurate and inappropriate,” says Mitch Stoltz, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who reviewed the material at WIRED’s request.
“It suggests, falsely, that ideas are property and that building on others’ ideas always requires permission,” Stoltz says. “The overriding message of this curriculum is that students’ time should be consumed not in creating but in worrying about their impact on corporate profits.”