Hong Kong’s kiddie Net spies
p2pnet news view | Kids & Kartels:- The US entertainment cartels have re-started their Kiddie Spy program, launched in Hong Kong at the beginning of the year.
Under it, 200,000 members of local youth groups will “spy on internet activity” and, “report illegal file transfers,” says the South China Morning Post.
This is in complete accord with other efforts to indoctrinate children with propaganda developed principally by the corporate movie and music industries.
Hong Kong is currently the only region in the world to have suborned the scouting movement to bolster activities aimed at preserving industry profits.
“The idea is to brainwash kids, parents and the general public into believing protecting Hollywood’s bottom line is an essential scouting activity,” we wrote recently.
“More than 60 gullible kids have, ‘participated in various kinds of intellectual property seminars, workshops and visits,’ says the press statement.
“And 23 scout ‘leaders’ are now ‘qualified’ scout ‘Respect for Intellectual Property Rights’ instructors, fulfilling the mission of, “promoting respect for IPRs to other Scout members.”
In January, the Hong Kong government proudly announced, “youngsters will be given a blacklist of suspect websites to monitor and asked to report any illegal uploading activities that they discover through the customs web page”.
Now, “Senior Superintendent Tam Yiu-Kueng, of Customs’ Intellectual Property Investigation Bureau, said the involvement of youth groups provided his department with extra monitoring capabilities,” says the South China Morning Post.
” ‘Initially we used 700 cadets from the Civil Aid Service for a three-month period,’ he said. ‘In that time we received over 800 reports of people illegally uploading… We were then able to inform the copyright holder and subsequently ask the website to remove the illegal content. If only 700 youths brought us such good results in three months, I think we will be very successful when the full 200,000 start helping us on July 19′
With children in hand, it’ll soon be time for the cartels to launch another drive, this time aimed at Hong Kong mums and dads.
Intellectual property department director Stephen Selby, “stressed the need for parental involvement,” says the story, which also has him saying, “We can’t do this by ourselves, it is important for parents to watch what their kids are doing on the Net.”
Meanwhile, “We will study how to facilitate copyright owners to take civil action against infringing activities on the internet as well as the role of internet service providers … Because it involves privacy we must be very careful - but we will study the examples set by other countries first.”
Also See:
South China Morning Post - War on piracy recruits 200,000 youthful spies, May 30, 2006
preserving industry profits - MPAA IP scout badge farce, April 25, 2006
given a blacklist - Child copyright spies, January 20, 2006
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May 31st, 2006 at 2:23 pm
Files that trouble the authorities dont seem to be very difficult to find. Why these people would need a bunch of boyscouts to locate files that are so easily found is really puzzling. On the other hand, it could be a great intro to the world of file sharing for kids who might never get the opportunity otherwise. If only one percent of those 200k kids becomes a serious uploader think of the benefits to all of us.
May 31st, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Right. It’ll give them a few good ideas about career opportunities.