Petteri Pyyny
24 Oct 2003 14:58
Two big intellectual property associations, RIAA and MPAA, have taken very different approaches to combat ever-growing online piracy. While RIAA keeps sueing its potential customers, MPAA tries to change people's attitudes (and trying to come up with watermarks, "creative" laws, etc).
MPAA's latest attempt to do something about P2P piracy is to educate schoolchildren about P2P and legal issues surrounding it. It has paid $100,000 (which seems ridiculously small amount compared to the size of the movie industry) to gets its anti-piracy ideas to 900,000 American schoolkids in grades 5 to 9. Organization called Junior Achievement will implement the campaign using volunteer teachers from the business sector.
In addition to scaring heck out of schoolkids by telling them that "if you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it", MPAA also has launched a nationwide campaign to show anti-piracy commercials in 5,000 movie theatres in the U.S.
Some copyright law experts are worried about the picture MPAA is trying to create for students, because U.S. copyright laws include "fair use" clauses that allow making copies for personal and educational use and this important exemption might (most likely will) get ignored when MPAA tells kids how the American copyright laws work (or should work from MPAA's point-of-view).
Source: Houston Chronicle