Scottish kids vs corporate clap-trap
p2pnet news view | Kids & Kartels:- “Pupils struggle to take piracy subject seriously.”
Seriously.
It’s the headline to a story in The Scotsman which states, “The consequences on a young person who tries drugs can be felt directly, but the effects of obtaining copied content online are distant from the perpetrator.”
A supposedly reputable national newspaper ties drug dealing directly to filesharing and then calls downloaders ‘perpetrators’?
“John McGhee is an IT integration manager with Glasgow City Council, a principal teacher of pastoral care and a teacher of computing at Holyrood School,” says the story, quoting him as stating >>>
There’s no national steer that this needs to be part of the curriculum, as you find when it’s not nationally driven it’s down to individual schools. If a child admitted they were taking drugs, there would be child protection or child welfare procedures that would kick in very quickly. If they admitted they were downloading content illegally, I suspect nothing would happen, other than a teacher saying, ‘You should not be downloading’.
That’s a societal view, not the school’s. Some adults think it’s a victimless crime, but there’s no such thing as a victimless crime. There should not be a different response to these subjects, so how do we address that?
With drugs, you’re seeing as harm to the child, rather than society. It is immediate harm to the child, whereas downloading songs is not immediately harmful, but it’s still illegal behaviour.
The article, liberally laced with sycophantic quotes from people running various bought-and-paid-for cartel organisations, reads as though it was written by a corporate entertainment industry hack.
It goes on >>>
The proposed Digital Economy Bill, which would affect the whole of the UK if passed, could also change how pupils are affected by their file-sharing ways, with parents having their broadband potentially cut off as a result.
Geoff Taylor, British Phonographic Industry chief executive, said the bill would be a welcomed addition to education projects, but more work was needed.
Adds McGhee:
“My view is you could end up with a lot of children getting involved and caught in illegality. Probably as a country we need to start to look at that. Why is it seen differently to other illegal behaviour? File-sharing has become the norm, rather than exception. Personal and social education is such a wide area that no teacher really has that scope of expertise.
“The challenge is to bring teachers up to speed and a confident level. You need a capacity for an ethical debate and a technical debate.”
He doesn’t explain how either could be possible given the involvement of Hollywood and the Big 4 record labels.
But there is a way to keep your kids safe from the cartels and the likes of McGhee.
Protect them by home-schooling them if you possibly can.
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
The Scotsman – Pupils struggle to take piracy subject seriously, January 6, 2010
Protect them – Home school families lead the way, December 27, 2009
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January 7th, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Home school? That sounds like Al-Qaida talk to me!
All children should be required to accept gov’t “instruction” on what is right and wrong, especially on political matters like copyright. Just like they tell kids it’s “right” to invade foreign nations and subjugate the populous so the corporations can get that oil out of the ground faster.
I love how they equate making a copy of something to theft. If you were not going to buy something anyways, it is inconsequential. But don’t let facts and logic stop these ninnies and control-freaks that are running the school system from flexing their petty ‘authority’ to dictate their political views as though it’s the gospel.
It’s a shame the schools have become the domain of adults that can’t hack it in the real world. These kids get a warped view of society when their adult role-models are all losers and nutjobs.
January 7th, 2010 at 9:18 pm
I posted this comment in the newspaper as well…
This is clearly crime of the century. To think that I’ve been worried about crack dealers all this time, when the real danger is from children socializing and hearing new music that they otherwise wouldn’t have encountered…
In case you couldn’t tell, I’m being sarcastic. Teenagers have always shared music with each other. When I was at school, trading cassette recordings of music obtained from CDs or Radio was commonplace. This is just the modern equivalent. I didn’t see anything wrong in it then and I don’t now, especially as those cassettes widened my musical knowledge and introduced me to new bands. Bands that I ended up financially supporting by buying their albums or attending concerts.
Equating this with drug dealing is just stupid. It shows the music industry have already lost the argument.
January 7th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
“File-sharing has become the norm, rather than exception.”
As a consequence, the law needs to change to reflect modern society, not the other way around!
January 8th, 2010 at 12:30 am
@David:
Yeah, but it won’t be very many years before rioting, looting, raping and murdering becomes the norm in the world– should the law be done away with to accommodate dystopia?
January 8th, 2010 at 7:21 am
You have to distinguish between law that protects the individual’s natural rights and law created to privilege commerce at the expense of the individual’s rights. Drugs endanger the individual’s right to life. File sharing conflicts with the reproduction monopoly granted to printers in the 18th century, and the protection of that monopoly necessitates the suspension of the individual’s cultural liberty and the invasion of their privacy (to check they aren’t infringing).
Laws that protect things other than the individual, at the expense of the individual, are those to be done away with, e.g. laws to protect the church against blasphemy necessitating the curtailment of an individual’s right to free speech.