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08.08

Ready or Not, U.S. Schoolchildren Join the Copyright Debate

By Sourish Basu

“There are at least 18 million adult songlifters in the United States,” says Music Rules!, an educational module about copyright sponsored by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Developed by Young Minds Inspired (YMI) for elementary- and middle-school classrooms, the module explains that songlifters are people who take songs without paying for them — such as illegal music downloaders on peer-to-peer networks. Besides using public information campaigns and punitive measures to curb songlifting, the music industry has also focused on the next generation of potential songlifters: elementary- and middle-school students.

Such educational initiatives are part of the content industry’s efforts to raise awareness about copyright and intellectual property. “We want everybody to have an understanding of what intellectual property is, and more importantly, why we have intellectual property and not just what it is,” says Joshua Friedlander, RIAA vice president of research and strategic analysis. Such understanding, the industries hope, will result in fewer copyright infringements such as illegal media downloads. The downloads, the content industries argue, are seriously damaging their business, which, by their own accounting, constitutes more than 6 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product.

While many intellectual property experts are receptive to the idea and purpose of copyright education, some of them fault the available initiatives for their style and content. Most campaigns from the content industry — such as Music Rules! — deliver some very unequivocal messages about copyright: copyright infringement is legally identical to theft, nothing free is ever legal and nothing worthwhile is ever free, computer users play a parasitic role on the copyright stage, and ‘fair use’ of copyrighted material is only permitted inside the classroom.

Such clear-cut right and wrong messages at an age when children are developing their moral compass, critics warn, could be extremely successful in skewing their perception of intellectual property. Coming from a teacher in the classroom, these messages could seem like fixed points of law instead of part of the copyright debate. More importantly, they say, these campaigns are trying to change the very terms of future debate on copyright by speaking to the future generation.

The black-and-white messages in these campaigns are typically delivered from a moral high ground of respect and fairness to the creator of an artistic work, the legal equivalence of copyright infringement to petty theft, and the possible death of all creativity in absence of copyright protection — illustrated by very black-and-white, often touching, stories.

Molly’s dad, a writer in What’s the Diff?, a joint production of the Motion Picture Association of America and Junior Achievement (JA), can’t find a publisher because his book has been leaked on the internet. A single mom in Donny the Downloader, produced by i-Safe and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, “can’t even afford to send her popular daughter to cheerleading camp” because her employer, an artist, can no longer pay her since illegal downloads have cut his profits. Copyright Awareness Week 2006, from the Copyright Society of USA, suggests that sans copyright protection, J.K. Rowling may never have written her books, and the kids’ favorite wizard might never have seen Hogwarts. And Michelle, a songwriter from Donny the Downloader, worries that “songs will go away” if people keep downloading illegally.

A world without copyright protection would not only be a world without stories and songs, it would also be a world in which Marco, a teenage aspiring singer, would starve, his dreams unfulfilled. World Intellectual Property Organization’s comic book, Copyright, tells grade schoolers that Marco — a character they can identify and empathize with – can succeed within the present industry structure only if everyone, including themselves, respects present copyright laws.

The focus of these messages — justice, fair play and the utility of copyright protection — is very different from campaigns aimed at college students, such as the Campus Downloading program. That program highlights the dangers of illegal downloading, such as viruses, spywares and lawsuits from copyright holders. This, Friedlander explains, is because most college students are already familiar with the concept of intellectual property and the laws protecting it, so emphasizing the personal consequences of copyright infringement is a far more effective message for them.

A typical elementary schooler, on the other hand, has no concept of copyright. “It’s very tough to explain to somebody the importance of copyright until they understand the concept of intellectual property, which, if you ask an eight-year-old straight up, they don’t know,” observes Friedlander. So, most grade-school curricula dwell on arguments of morality, fairness, the significance of intellectual property and the benefits of copyright protection for creators. However, while these arguments are appealing, they often hide nuances of intellectual property rights under blanket statements and oversimplifications.

“You have to be awfully young, awfully naïve or awfully both, to believe in free anything,” columnist Leonard Pitts is quoted as saying in What’s the Diff? “If you haven’t paid for it, you’ve stolen it,” the text summarizes later. Although usually true for CDs and DVDs, the blanket notion of nothing legal being free is not only misleading, but may conflict with the children’s everyday experiences too, thinks Wendy Seltzer, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. “I hope most of them have library cards, and recognize that they can go into their public libraries and pull plenty of useful and fun books off the shelves” without paying for a look, she quips.

The other side of the coin, namely the idea that nothing free is valuable, is also there. "People value what they pay for," asserts Michelle in Donny the Downloader, "it's not good for music to treat it like it's free... like it's worthless." This implicit association of price with worth is troublesome to Tarleton Gillespie, author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture. Copyright "tries to manage the cultural value of a work with its economic value," he explains, and although present market models tell us that a $50 stereo is better than a $10 stereo, measuring the value of a creative effort by its price, he warns, can often cause its "economic value to distort its cultural value."

Although developers of these programs argue that presenting the complex topic of copyright to middle schoolers necessitates some simplification, those are always towards stronger copyrights, Gillespie notes. “We never see fair use overstated,” he observes. Most campaigns either omit or understate the doctrine of fair use, which allows partial reproduction of a work for scholarship, review, criticism and parody. Fair use is only permissible for schoolwork inside the classroom, according to Join the © Team, from the Entertainment Software Association and YMI, a far cry from its codification in the Copyright Act of 1976. And in 2004, even vice president of JA Education Darrell Luzzo admitted that their module What’s the Diff? had understated fair use.

Most of these campaigns do not distinguish between copyright infringement, which is a civil offense, and property theft, which is a criminal offense. Such campaigns suggest that copyright violation is identical to robbing the copyright holder, a notion that is born, Seltzer explains, of considering payment to the creator as the end-point of copyright. The U.S. notion of copyright, on the other hand, was created "to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing to authors and inventors for a limited time the exclusive rights" to their invention, she elaborates. "Even payment to the artist was only incidental to encouraging artists and authors to produce new works and give them to the public," not the reason for the existence of copyright.

Although a few campaigns include classroom debates on copyright, they are hopelessly pitched. One role-playing activity from What's the Diff? pitches a computer user against five characters from a movie set. The five hardworking characters — which include a singer and an actor, for example — contribute positively to society and the creative arts. Their professions are jeopardized by the babbling, freeloading computer user’s illegal downloads, Ironically, the computer user — the parasitic media pirate — is the only one of the six roles a middle schooler might realistically assume in real life.

Partly in response to the industry-supported campaigns — which have been accused of dwelling too much on restrictions of copyright and less so on consumers’ rights — several public interest groups and governmental bodies have come out with their own educational material, such as Taking the Mystery out of Copyright, from the Library of Congress. School librarians can also take courses on copyright from the American Library Association to better interpret the industry-sponsored modules they receive.

Experts on intellectual property are divided on whether copyright as a separate topic even needs to be introduced in grade schools. Although teenagers are significant consumers of intellectual property, that’s not reason enough for a copyright course, says Seltzer. “Schools don’t spend their time teaching kids about speed limits, either,” she adds. “When they get out on the road, they learn how to obey the speed limit.” Similarly, putting copyright in context, such as an incentive to innovation in an economics class, could be much more useful.

However, Friedlander argues that while some of the educational materials do present copyright as part of a broader lesson — such as economics or physics — some of them are, by design, open-ended. This is particularly useful at the elementary school level, he notes, because all subjects are typically taught by the same teacher, and this open-ended structure allows “the individual educator to decide where [the lesson] would fit best for their students.”

Even if copyright were covered as a separate topic in the classroom, it could benefit from a balanced, yet simplified, treatment, says Gillespie. There’s a business part in getting music from a band to the consumer, and money must flow through that part to ensure that the band keeps creating music. But that music belongs to the consumer, his peers and his community too, he says, because if no one built it into their lives, that music wouldn’t exist either. The story of copyright is the story of trying to nurture both these parts, he explains, “and that story, I think, would make sense to kids, and you could [tell it] at whatever level of sophistication you needed to.”

Sourish Basu is a physics Ph.D. student at Cornell University. Basu was selected to be the 2007 IEEE-USA-sponsored AAAS Science and Engineering Mass Media Fellow. He spent the summer as a science reporter at Scientific American. When he’s not poring over equations, Sourish can usually to be found biking, hiking, cooking or roaming around with one of his cameras. Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.

Opinions expressed are the author's.