Teens appear to be willing to curtail illegal downloading when told they face fines or jail time.
This finding, among many in a survey published by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) on Wednesday, is the basis for the software company’s new campaign to teach teens respect for intellectual property rights.
[...]Microsoft’s survey found that about half of the teenagers surveyed (49%) said they are not familiar with the rules and guidelines for downloading content from the Internet. Only 11% understood the rules well, and of those, 82% said downloading content illegally merits punishment. Among those unfamiliar with the law, only 57% supported punishment for intellectual property violations.
[...]Nevertheless, Microsoft wants to correct teens’ woeful ignorance. To do so, it has turned to Topics Education, a developer of custom curricula, to create a curriculum called “Intellectual Property Rights Education” for middle school and high school teachers. The Microsoft-sponsored curriculum consists of Web-based resources and case-study driven lesson plans that aim to engage students about intellectual property issues.
Read about it (here). Via, Slashdot.
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Big corporations providing school curricula? Yum!
Sadly, it’s already happening… I think I’ve heard about other corporations doing similar things, although I can’t recall specifics. I *do* know that when I go to my daughter’s school, there are posters all over the place which are barely-concealed advertisements for current movies, books, and musical artists.
For instance, a year or two ago there was a poster in the lunchroom that said something like, “$DISNEYCHARACTER says to eat a good lunch every day!” and underneath was, “See $DISNEYCHARACTER in $DISNEYMOVIE this spring in theaters near you!”
The mind boggles.
M
let’s just hope it’s nothing like those godawful anti-piracy commercials before movies and on DVDs…