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Clearly suing downloaders and pirates doesn't work. That's obvious at this point, so some creative types have come up with a new idea: educate children about copyright while still in school. According to a bunch of authors that took to parliament yesterday to put forward some new ideas on combating the pirating of online media, the best way to do it would be an assembly on copyright law once a year.
As you might expect, this idea comes from people who are a little up there in years. 50 year old Joanne Harris was one member of the group that spoke to MPs this week, suggesting that children need to learn that downloading books or films was not “sticking it to the man.” She also showed a quick stab of bitterness at J K Rowling's success, despite her own, by saying that not everyone can get paid Hollywood money because “we happened to write a little story about wizards one day.”
Her companion in this venture was Wendy Cope OBE, who was born at the close of World War II and seemed concerned that photocopying her poems was a major problem. “There is a need of education, because so many people are so completely ignorant of the basic fact of copyright,” she said. “It seems to me it would take five minutes to explain, once a year in assembly, that there is such a thing as the law of copyright. Assemblies in every school in the country that such a thing of copyright exists – so these people who tell me I have photocopied your poem and sent it to all my friends know that they are breaking the law.”
Today kids, we're going to learn about copyright law violations and how you can promote legal media sales!
This isn't the same ideal shared by all authors of course. Back in 2012 BitTorrent Inc. partnered with Tim Ferriss, author of several highly popular books, to release it for free as part of a bundle of extra materials not available elsewhere. Other authors have done similar things, giving them huge promotion at the cost of giving away a few copies of their books.
Regardless though, trying to explain anything to a group of children is challenging. When you bring up the subject of copyright law, it seems very unlikely that you'll get an attentive audience.
KitGuru Says: I'm an author and as a heads up, if you want to torrent my book, that's awesome. Thanks for reading it. [Thanks TorrentFreak] Image Source: Christinao Betta
Oh god, yeah all those poems I photocopied in school and that.
bad ass over here
or how many teachers use to photocopy books to have us read them. Or how many reports we sourced with photocopies.
No I think their is a line you should not cross. But in digital age I think their could be a self erase feature. you download a youtube vid or a song for free but it only lasts a few days then self erases. so if you truly want the song you have to pay for it. This would be fair in this media driven world and allow the downloader the ability to sample his/her media before committing to buy. Or better yet be able to listen to music/video online free but if you want to download you have to pay a small fee, aka $1.99 a song or $15-$20.00 A movie/album/book this way everyone wins and gets what they want. I `believe a compromise is in order. And times do change. But hard work does need to be rewarded and acknowledged. So either option today is a viable solution. But if artists really were concerned then VH1 MTV CMT Audio.com on satilite or any other open media should never have been formed these birthed Youtube, Cable audio channels, ect which in turn are limitless free media from music and books. So What is the real question. it is how many friends can I have over to watch a video I purchased up to 25 or up to 5k. where does it end. In greed or logic. You authors and sharers alike will have to decide at one point. I think freedom of information should be just that. I think thw two ideas I have shown have merit what do you think.
Teachers have special copyright permissions for ‘educational materials’, by the way. As for auto-erase idea, it would be *very* easy to disable, as with every other similar attempt. In fact, this idea has already been implemented, for PDFs and other ebooks, and is exceptionally easy to disable. No, it’s quite clear that whether we (or others) like it or not, the answer is not and cannot be DRM. $1.99 per song is an *insane* amount of money, by the way, particularly when it costs them nothing for distribution and could cost them nothing for promotion (if they were smart and promo-execs weren’t taking a cut). In terms of pricing, to incentivise legal alternatives we’d be talking £1 for a movie, or around £0.10 per song, along with universal non-geographically available libraries – anything else (or more in cash terms) simply wouldn’t act as an alternative to piracy.
I know. I felt so naughty photocopying poems. Everyone was doing it when I was at school though. We’d sneak down to the photocopiers, and make copies of the poems. But, it all ended when one kid got arrested. He was caught with 25,000 copies of the same poem. He’d been selling them to other kids on the cheap, cutting the poem author out of some steady profits