Byte Rights: Back to School

Posted 09/28/2009 at 12:00pm | by Quinn Norton

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As the summer wanes, the days get shorter, and the wind starts hinting of fall, you’ll naturally ask, what’s hawt in curriculum this year? Forget sex ed and intelligent design, the latest educational brawl is copyright!
 
Curriculums are being shipped to thousands of schools across America to teach our children all about intellectual property—every lesson plan authored by a lobbying group or industry association. It’s even legally required now in California’s famously overfunded schools.

I’m pretty into this copyright thing, but I still try to drop by the real world on occasion, just to see how it’s going. In real life, schools are struggling with larger classes and fewer resources. Now, instead of music or art (or my favorite elective, ninjutsu), we’re going to have our overworked teachers inculcating children about one side or the other of the copyfight? Great.

The BSA (Business Software Association), MPAA, RIAA, and even EFF are all into it. The lesson plans play to type—the EFF, geeky; the rightholders, incomprehensible—explaining more about the attitudes of the people that created them than they do about IP.

According to the BSA in its online K-2 “Cyber Tree House,” it’s uncool for kindergartners to “download or share copyrighted software programs, music, movies, or games without paying for them” or “copy pictures or books and magazines without permission from the author or artist.”

The MPAA has—I’m not kidding—”Lucky and Flo, the world’s first-ever DVD-sniffing dogs...” who are “trained to detect pirated DVDs.” Ah, childhood memories of being talked down to by people who think kids are idiots.

The EFF’s lesson plan ends in a mock trial of “the legal drama of Walt Disney Studios v. Faden.” I love the EFF, but the kids into that drama already applied to be EFF interns over the summer.

But as lost in minutia as the EFF might be, the rightholders’ lesson plans occasionally veer into naked contempt. Kids won’t hear the ideology; they’ll hear that minutia, or that contempt. Or, hopefully, it will all get ignored by teachers, and kids will hear band instruments, poetry, or the hissing of Bunsen burners.

Quinn Norton writes about copyright for Wired News and other publications. Her work has ranged from legal journalism to the inner life of pirate organizations.