P2P ethics in lower school

With little kids who've never known life without the Internet, the ethic somehow came to be something like: if you can get it on the Net, it must be ok to have. That's why the media industry is taking file-sharing ethics ed to younger and younger children. Elementary schools in the Washington, D.C., area are inviting AOL's SafetyBot, a 5-foot-tall robot into classrooms to explain to 4th-, 5th-, and 6th-graders why it's illegal to download movies, music, and software from the Internet. According to the Washington Post, "the industry's approach is two-pronged: to terrify and to teach." The "terrify" part is where it's explained to the kids that they're not anonymous when their stealing media; they can be caught." Last month, the Motion Picture Association announced that it would begin suing those who download, one by one, to scare file-sharers away from the practice many believe has taken a chunk out of industry revenue in recent years," the Post reports. "With this, the movie industry followed the lead of the Recording Industry Association of America, which started its first lawsuits in fall 2003." (The RIAA announced today that it was suing 754 more file-sharers, taking the total number of lawsuits past the 7,000 mark, Reuters reports).

Older student perspectives on file-sharing can be found in a recent article at the news site of California State University, Chico, "Right, wrong? Good, evil? Who cares?", which points to FreeCulture.org, "founded by the student who sued diebold" (see Mother Jones) and probably a little to the left of Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons (but fans of it).