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.

Naturally, there has been a huge number of critics of Music Rules! with groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation calling it a propaganda effort. The EFF also points to a number of inaccuracies in the material such as the activity which asks students to calculate the price of downloading a song, making the assumption that an illegal download equals a lost sale.

More blatantly though, it points to an activity in which the students are asked to start an anti-piracy campaign in their community and to contact local newspapers and TV stations to get their message heard, an activity which the EFF says turns students into RIAA’s “own unpaid public relations staff”.

In response, the EFF have produced an alternative cirriculum called Teaching Copyright which they say focuses on teaching the students their digital rights rather than telling them what not to do.

There’s also another alternative in cartoon form made by ASCAP (The American Society of songwriters, composers and music publishers) called Donny The Downloader in which Donny downloads some music from “Half-Dollar” (ahem) and gets told off by a cheerleader who blames his downloading for getting her mom fired.

So far, the Youtube trailer has racked up a measly 11 views, which maybe highlights how interesting this material is for the kids more than anything else.

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

For years we’ve heard stories of court cases in the U.S. where the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) attempted to sue copyright infringers for damages only to find out those people had died or ended up being seven and twelve year old girls so why does the music industry still tread down the path of punishment? Why doesn’t it foster a pragmatic approach to the digital music problem? Imagine if Napster had been welcomed rather than attacked? There are alternatives suggested which need to be looked at. Examples include a plan to make file-sharing legal but charge for the volume of data transferred. Another involves the user paying for an add-on subscription to their broadband to download music with the revenue dished out amongst the copyright holders i.e. – the record companies. Legal services like Spotify which allows access to an unlimited streaming music library with occasional adverts between songs are pointing the way forward also.

The industry needs to recognise that people will always want to share music, whether it is by cassette tape or an MP3. That proponent means this cat and mouse filesharing game will continue unless an agreeable solution for both the industry and the customer is reached.