"If you didn't pay for it, you've stolen it!"
Hollywood Preaches Anti-Piracy to Schools Thu Oct 23, 3:09 PM ET By RON HARRIS, Associated Press Writer SAN FRANCISCO - As part of its campaign to thwart online music and movie piracy, Hollywood is now reaching into school classrooms with a program that denounces file-sharing and offers prizes for students and teachers who spread the word about Internet theft. The Motion Picture Association of America paid $100,000 to deliver its anti-piracy message to 900,000 students nationwide in grades 5-9 over the next two years, according to Junior Achievement Inc., which is implementing the program using volunteer teachers from the business sector. "What's the Diff?: A Guide to Digital Citizenship" launched last week with a lesson plan that aims to keep kids away from Internet services like Kazaa that let users trade digital songs and film clips: "If you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it." The program appears to be working, with students in dozens of middle schools announcing that they will not enter their school libraries. Said one student: "These libraries let lots of kids read the same books...that's like Kazaa lets lots of people listen to songs!" Another one added that they are joining a Christian Coalition program to shut down parties that other students run. "They are, like, letting kidz listen to music and stuff," said one banner-toting teenybopper. TM: the last two paragraphs were of course added by me. But the point is still valid, that much of Hollywood's claims about "illegal listening" are not really any different from "reading without buying" books and magazines in libraries. The more urgent issue is this crap about corporations buying time in public schools. If I had a kid in a school and it was proposed that Nike, Time-Warner, Coke, or Intel would be buying teaching time, I'd tell them to stop it pretty fucking quick or face the Mother of All Columbines. --Tim May
At 10:43 PM 10/23/2003 -0700, Tim May wrote:
"What's the Diff?: A Guide to Digital Citizenship" launched last week with a lesson plan that aims to keep kids away from Internet services like Kazaa that let users trade digital songs and film clips: "If you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it."
The program appears to be working, with students in dozens of middle schools announcing that they will not enter their school libraries. Said one student: "These libraries let lots of kids read the same books...that's like Kazaa lets lots of people listen to songs!"
Another one added that they are joining a Christian Coalition program to shut down parties that other students run. "They are, like, letting kidz listen to music and stuff," said one banner-toting teenybopper.
TM: the last two paragraphs were of course added by me. But the point is still valid, that much of Hollywood's claims about "illegal listening" are not really any different from "reading without buying" books and magazines in libraries. The more urgent issue is this crap about corporations buying time in public schools. If I had a kid in a school and it was proposed that Nike, Time-Warner, Coke, or Intel would be buying teaching time, I'd tell them to stop it pretty fucking quick or face the Mother of All Columbines.
Your tongue-in-cheek mention about libraries being hot beds of piracy set me to thinking about the mechanics of sharing copyrighted content and whether there might be a technical solution which addresses the letter of the law in abiding copyright but allows consumers almost unfettered access to the music they have downloaded. Not long ago I found that my county library had contracted with a service provider to enable patrons to download electronic versions of books, which they could read at their leisure during a certain time window (usually from a few days to a week). After this time the 'reader' software would no longer allow access to the book even though it was stored on the user's local disc. In this way it created a virtual 'lending' environment wherein the number of readers of a particular title being read was always less than or equal to the number of licenses the service owned for each work. Why couldn't this be applied on-line to music. Under current fair use provisions readers and listeners who have purchased a work are allowed to lend it out freely. Surely the number of people who want to read or listen to a work are much smaller at any particular moment than the number of people who have ripped/downloaded a work (perhaps only 1 in 100 at most). If some mechanism could be made part of the P2P systems purchasers of the work could 'lend' it to others to read, view or hear when they are not using it. As long as the system gave some assurance to Hollywood that the works were not being enjoyed at any one moment by more people than had paid for the works then the spirit of a lending library would be maintained. I'm sure some will jump in and say that because I purchased the music on a CD, then I must lend the CD, but it is already (I believe) considered fair use for purchasers to rip their CDs and transfer them to a PC, etc. If the purchaser was willing to destroy the CD then they would only have one copy on their disc (perhaps its and .mp3 now). why couldn't they lend this copy? Someone else must have thought up this idea, but I don't recall seeing it. Please inform me nicely if you have seen it proposed before. steve
On Friday 24 October 2003 02:46, Steve Schear wrote:
Why couldn't this be applied on-line to music. Under current fair use provisions readers and listeners who have purchased a work are allowed to lend it out freely. Surely the number of people who want to read or listen to a work are much smaller at any particular moment than the number of people who have ripped/downloaded a work (perhaps only 1 in 100 at most). If some mechanism could be made part of the P2P systems purchasers of the work could 'lend' it to others to read, view or hear when they are not using it. As long as the system gave some assurance to Hollywood that the works were not being enjoyed at any one moment by more people than had paid for the works then the spirit of a lending library would be maintained.
Someone else must have thought up this idea, but I don't recall seeing it. Please inform me nicely if you have seen it proposed before.
This sounds a lot like the SunnComm DRM system that got so much publicity recently. (the one that relies on Windows' CD Autorun "feature") That system allows the user of a protected CD to make expiring copies of some tracks to share. The problem with the central premise, of course, is that without some Big (Brother) Central Server, there's just no way to track simultaneous usage, so there's no way to assure that the number of users <= the number of owners. You can be sure that [MP|RI]AA will accept nothing less than perfect accounting. And if the system relies on my destroying my physical CDs to share the MP3 copies, forget it. The MP3s are backups for my CDs, but my CDs are also backups for the MP3 files. I've already re-ripped my whole collection once to change bitrates and unify tag information. When OGG hardware gets more widespread, there's at least one more ripping party in the offing. If that's what it takes to share, then I'll just remain a stingy bastard.
At 06:28 AM 10/24/2003 -0400, Roy M. Silvernail wrote:
Someone else must have thought up this idea, but I don't recall seeing it. Please inform me nicely if you have seen it proposed before.
This sounds a lot like the SunnComm DRM system that got so much publicity recently. (the one that relies on Windows' CD Autorun "feature") That system allows the user of a protected CD to make expiring copies of some tracks to share.
The problem with the central premise, of course, is that without some Big (Brother) Central Server, there's just no way to track simultaneous usage, so there's no way to assure that the number of users <= the number of owners.
Why not have each individual's PC which offered to lend do the accounting. This means their PC must be on-line whenever someone who didn't pay wants to listen, limiting the number of copies available, but it could be fully decentralized.
You can be sure that [MP|RI]AA will accept nothing less than perfect accounting. And if the system relies on my destroying my physical CDs to share the MP3 copies, forget it.
This is a possible problem. If the tracks were originally purchased as .mp3 then this might not be a problem. steve
On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 10:43:22PM -0700, Tim May wrote:
TM: the last two paragraphs were of course added by me. But the point is still valid, that much of Hollywood's claims about "illegal listening" are not really any different from "reading without buying" books and magazines in libraries. The more urgent issue is this crap
Not to mention all the CDs and movies available in libraries. What's the difference in borrowing CDs from a library and taking them home and taping or mp3ing them and getting them from the net?
about corporations buying time in public schools. If I had a kid in a school and it was proposed that Nike, Time-Warner, Coke, or Intel would be buying teaching time, I'd tell them to stop it pretty fucking quick or face the Mother of All Columbines.
Or even worse the practice of Coke, Pepsi, et al paying money to the school for exclusive rights to market their product. Also sort of like what M$ did in schools and colleges -- gave them some free computers on the condition that all competing software be removed from computer labs. Not surprising at all that megacorps now want to buy teaching time in schools. In Japan the megacorp have long run their own schools for workers kids to ensure the loyalty of their future workers. -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
Steve Schear writes:
Why not have each individual's PC which offered to lend do the accounting. This means their PC must be on-line whenever someone who didn't pay wants to listen, limiting the number of copies available, but it could be fully decentralized.
You'd have to piggyback this on some P2P app. Otherwise, the lender would have to run an accessable server. That can be a trick if you're behind a NAT or your ISP takes exception to unsolicited incoming packets. Also, how do you handle check-in, or more importantly, lack of check-in? Timeout? Can you queue checkout requests? Interesting idea, but it sounds kind of cumbersome to roll out. -- Roy M. Silvernail is roy@rant-central.com, and you're not http://www.rant-central.com is the new scytale Never Forget: It's Only 1's and 0's! SpamAssassin->procmail->/dev/null->bliss
On Friday, October 24, 2003, at 08:14 AM, Harmon Seaver wrote:
On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 10:43:22PM -0700, Tim May wrote:
TM: the last two paragraphs were of course added by me. But the point is still valid, that much of Hollywood's claims about "illegal listening" are not really any different from "reading without buying" books and magazines in libraries. The more urgent issue is this crap
Not to mention all the CDs and movies available in libraries. What's the difference in borrowing CDs from a library and taking them home and taping or mp3ing them and getting them from the net?
None, and in fact I have made my own DAT and CD copies of many hundreds of CDs I borrowed. I also burn an average one DVD per day, of movies and suchlike.
about corporations buying time in public schools. If I had a kid in a school and it was proposed that Nike, Time-Warner, Coke, or Intel would be buying teaching time, I'd tell them to stop it pretty fucking quick or face the Mother of All Columbines.
Or even worse the practice of Coke, Pepsi, et al paying money to the school for exclusive rights to market their product. Also sort of like what M$ did in schools and colleges -- gave them some free computers on the condition that all competing software be removed from computer labs. Not surprising at all that megacorps now want to buy teaching time in schools. In Japan the megacorp have long run their own schools for workers kids to ensure the loyalty of their future workers.
This last point I have no problem with, provided Megacorp pays all the costs for its own schools. In fact, I support bringing back indentured servitude. The problem is when a "public school," which taxpayers have been ordered to pay for, becomes the fiefdom of a corporation. If a child is compelled to attend school, as he is, he may not be compelled to watch commercials or listen to corporate pitches. --Tim May "Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat." --David Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11
participants (5)
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Harmon Seaver -
Roy M. Silvernail -
roy＠rant-central.com
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Steve Schear -
Tim May