Last week I concluded this column by stating that while you throttle bandwidth or block websites for people caught illegally downloading music, you’ll have a harder time changing the habits of the young people who have been downloading music for free for as long as they’ve been using the computer.
It seems the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have already recognised this and have actually produced a cirriculum for teaching respect for intellectual property and responsible use of the internet to school children.
It’s called Music Rules! and its website claims it “informs students about the laws of copyright and the risks of online file-sharing, while promoting musical and artistic creativity”.
It offers teachers and parents free materials from its site which includes activity sheets to make kids think about the effects of downloading. They range from asking the student to write down what a singer, producer or DJ would say about the effects of “songlifting” to asking them to interview friends and family about where they got their music and put the results in a chart. By the end of the cirriculum, students sign a pledge to never download music and to respect intellectual copyright law.
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RIAA awarded $1.92M in P2P case
A jury in Minnesota awarded the damages to the music industry representative body after 32 year old mother of four Jammie Thomas-Rasset was found to have infringed copyright by downloading and sharing 24 songs on the Kazaa. That’s a whopping $80,000 per track.
http://tinyurl.com/rassetcase
Buy the t-shirt, get the album
Rapper Mos Def is offering a novel t-shirt package for his excellent new album The Ecstatic which comes with the album cover on the front, tracklisting on the back and a download code on the tag.
http://tinyurl.com/mostee
The Manga Messiah
Culch.ie has unearthed a Manga comic about Jesus which has the by-line: “HAS HE COME to SAVE the WORLD… or DESTROY IT? ”
http://tinyurl.com/jesusmanga
Last week’s announcement that Eircom has conceded to a plan to stop illegal downloading in the face of court proceedings will come as no surprise to those who are familiar with the music industry’s attempts to save profits from music piracy. Under the plan, Ireland’s largest ISP (Internet Service Provider), Eircom agrees to work with the four major labels in Ireland (SonyBMG, Universal, Warners and EMI) in implementing a “three strikes and you’re out” rule. This means that Eircom customers will be disconnected if the record companies claim a user has repeatedly downloaded music illegally using P2P (peer to peer) networks through Eircom’s service. Eircom’s case wasn’t helped by the fact that the company’s ads appeared on The Pirate Bay, a popular torrent site which is being targeted in Sweden for large scale illegal music and movie piracy.
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