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RIAA hopes unpaid child labour will help fight piracy
Whilst most adults know that it's illegal to share music online, there's clearly a question of how to teach school-kids the law - and their fair-use rights. Enter the RIAA's recently updated "Music-Rules!" curriculum, which encourages youngsters to create class projects to educate their peers in how to legitimately obtain music:
Imagine that you are in the music industry... With your team of fellow music industry employees, plan an information campaign that lets others know why it's important to get their music the right way... You'll want to convince your classmates that your teams' plan is the one that will become the class project!Whilst it's understandable that the RIAA would seek to 'educate' children in the legality of sharing music online, the convenient ommision of fair-use (complex though it may be to explain to younger children) means that the RIAA's campaign fails to convince us it's anything more than a glorified PR campaign. After years of intimidating adults, and now attempting to use children as unpaid PR hacks, it's hard to do anything but criticise the RIAA's ongoing tactics.
Challenge: Take your campaign a step further by contacting the editor of your community newspaper or the director of your community cable television station to see if you can submit an article or video about your campaign.
[Via Boing Boing]
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsshibathedogSep 19th 2009 12:53PM
Reading that made me sick a little bit. Especially this part:
Challenge: Take your campaign a step further by contacting the editor of your community newspaper or the director of your community cable television station to see if you can submit an article or video about your campaign.
pedromileskiSep 19th 2009 1:51PM
The RIAA is at it again. The labels underpay and rip off their artists and now their organization is trying to get kids to do their ads for free. I download stuff that I've paid for previously in another form, (8-track and other forms of tape and vinyl), or download something to see if it's good enough to pay for. I'm old enough to remember when vinyl albums cost $2.99 and I can't see or afford spending $!5 plus for something which might suck. The music industry as a whole is dying in the form it's in and the RIAA is a dinosaur. Record labels used to spend time and $$ developing artists letting them record several albums before deciding to dump them.. Some labels let money losing artists put out albums because they were proud to have such a quality artist on their label. Now all they care about is $$ and blockbuster, multi-platinum albums. This is the main reason sales are down but they can't see it. They want to go after downloaders because the downloaders are ripping them off but they rip off their artists. How about artists putting their music on the net and asking for a reasonable royalty fee. That eliminates the RIAA and their members.
FagerstaSep 19th 2009 4:10PM
This is disgusting. I can't believe this is allowed in schools at all. There's zero educational value. This is pure indoctrination.
I've already totally boycotted buying any RIAA-affiliated albums. This is a great resource for that: http://www.riaaradar.com/
There are aslo some good userscripts to show if an album is "safe" or not on Amazon.
gameplace123Jun 8th 2010 2:01AM
Isn't that nice the RIAA goes from suing kids to making them work for them...
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/09/09/music.swap.settlement/