The last thing we should do is teach students to be obedient (i.e. “follow”). We need to inform them of the consequences when they break copyright law but also need to get them questioning the ethics behind laws that prevent citizens from sharing culture.

“I just wish I could teach a class where we could have discussions like this, but what class does this fit into?”

I’ve done so the past several years. Last semester my class read a good portion of Lessig’s “Free Culture”, watched documentaries, and discussed some of the issues around copyright. The last time I checked, the IB ITGS course included a unit on “Intellectual Property” (sic). What I’ve taught has been my own thing but if your school is IB, this stuff would fit into that course quite well.

This blog post by David Pogue may resonate with you.

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/the-generational-divide-in-copyright-morality/

The IBO has already setup an excellent course for the IB Diploma Programme called Information Technology in a Global Society (ITGS), which considers the impacts of technology on people’s lives. We consider ethical issues including copyright. The IBO’s learner profile likes issues to be uncertain. It encourages discussion and critical thinking.

ITGS is only taught post 16. It would be good to give more opportunity to explore these issues much earlier in the curriculum.

No, no, it is still not legal to download the stuff. Rather, the search engine itself is not committing an illegal act by pointing to an illegal download.

That’s the distinction.

Content producers deserve to make a living, but piracy is a natural response to media companies trying to protect old business models. This is at a time when it is so easy to duplicate and redistribute content digitally. I am not going to condone piracy, but you should also look at this from an international perspective. If it was not for piracy then young Chinese people would have not have access to all the great content such as A Clockwork Orange and Nirvana CDs that is opening up my friends’ eyes to new ideas that got their parents in prison during the cultural revolution.

There is no HMV or Virgin Megastore in mainland China. Itunes does not operate for Chinese credit card holders and the local media is heavily censored. How else can young people in China on a very limited income access content that Western audiences take for granted?

Rather than rely on the MPAA and the RIAA, it is upto to the media industry to invest in new business models. I am encouraged that Itunes started selling DRM free content, although it is not as good as Emusic who have absolutely no copy protection on the music they sell. Even Andrew Keen of The Cult of Amateur fame praised them in his book. Maybe movie download services will also follow this lead.

It is not as clear cut as saying that people who pirate content are bad given the inappropriate boundaries that the content producers have set. Let us look at the more pragmatic views setup by Lawrence Lessing, the father of Creative Commons. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing is an extreme free culture advocate, but he turned me on to a great film called “Steal This Film”, which explores how the culture of copyright is a very recent chapter in our history, which goes against the grain of people sharing ideas with each other.

The PirateBay got raided in 2006, but they kept going because they just link to other people’s content rather than cache it on their servers. The same is true for Baidu. Google is just more conservative about who it links to, although they still benefit from copyright violation on Youtube, which they own.

That is a very long ramble for saying that piracy is not a black and white issue.

According to Hall Davidson’ copyright chart, though you can use copyrighted classroom projects you can’t use that music if it’s stolen.