7 ms·

The copyright cartel's plot to indoctrinate California kindergartens

111 points by timw6n 13y ago

joliv 13y ago
The doesn't seem HORRIBLE: although it may not be good that external companies are influencing the curriculum, an understanding of copyright seems like an idea that is understandable for the CSLA to want to teach in some regard.
- timw6n 13y ago
  I agree that giving kids an accurate understanding is important — the problem with these teaching materials is that they're being very selective in which parts of copyright law that they teach: According to the linked article, there's no mention of Fair Use provisions, which the record industry would much rather you didn't take advantage of, in the curriculum at all.
  - 3825 13y ago
    I submit that an understanding of taxation and representative democracy is more important. We cannot teach everything in school. Class time is a limited resource and wasting it on copyright and what not is a clear abomination. I'd rather kids learned more useful things like learning to read, write, and do arithmetic.
  - jackalope 13y ago
    And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I blew my stack when my child was assigned this worksheet from the the RIAA's Music Rules! program as homework: http://www.music-rules.com/pdf/MusicRulesElemActivities.pdf http://www.music-rules.com/pdf/MusicRulesElemActivities.pdf Part 2 is particularly egregious: "Now find out if songlifting is a real problem in your community. Use this chart to interview family members and friends about where they get their music. Bring your findings back to class and combine them with those of your classmates." Really?!! You want our children to compile a list of family and friends (identified by age only, but still...) that you believe are breaking the law and hand it in as signed homework? I complained immediately about this not-so-subtle indoctrination and provided the teacher with a link to the EFF's more balanced and accurate Teaching Copyright site at http://www.teachingcopyright.org/ http://www.teachingcopyright.org/. Songlifting. Give me a break...
    - noonespecial 13y ago
      I sense the approach of Mike Godwin on this one.
- mikegagnon 13y ago
  I find the scheme abominable because corporations are attempting to mold the unconscious minds of elementary school students to morally support specific political policies (viz. copyright). And they're using public education as the distribution method for their propaganda.
jmgrosen 13y ago
Brave New World, anybody?
- aqme28 13y ago
  How exactly?
lawnchair_larry 13y ago
We should be far more worried about religious indoctrination than this.
- kintamanimatt 13y ago
  I'm not sure one is worse than the other. Politically motivated indoctrination and religious indoctrination both cripple minds.
- seiji 13y ago
  I'd love to see people stand up to Big Religion, but... how? Religion is institutionalized mental and physical child abuse and everybody seems a-okay with all of it.
  - VLM 13y ago
    An inaccurate claim at the end given the trend toward irreligion in the united states. The wikipedia article of the same title is a pretty good summary.
  - ars 13y ago
    > everybody seems a-okay with all of it. Because it's not abuse. Since when did it become socially acceptable to be bigoted in public? If you want to be intolerant at least keep your nastiness to yourself.
    - derleth 13y ago
      So telling little gay kids that they were born broken and are going to Hell isn't abuse? Don't you dare say that it doesn't happen or that it doesn't matter. Don't you dare.
      - drdeca 13y ago
        To me it seems like calling that the fault of "religion" seems roughly analogous to blaming the concept of "government" for the actions of a specific city or state/province government? (that is, either 1 or 2 levels below a national government , though I might have made a mistake with the analogy there) Not all religions/versions of a religion are the same. I acknowledge that an analogy is not always a particularly strong argument, but it was the first responce I thought of, and it seemed an acceptable responce to me. Also, it might have made more sense to respond a few levels up, not sure what would have made the most sense to reply to.
javajosh 13y ago
Yes, it has angered me for many years - and has been a bitter regret my entire life - that my public school basically forced me to break the law for so many years, and never more egregiously than when I made my collages. To all of the authors, photographers, and publishers of the many magazines and newspapers that I defaced and stole from: I am so, so sorry. I never realized that it was your work, your life blood, and your property that I was so recklessly and wantonly stealing from. My teachers never even mentioned the word "copyright" and I had no idea I had to ask your permission, individually. Of course, ignorance of the law is no excuse, even for a young child, and now I have to live with the shame and the guilt every day. There are many ways that America's schoolchildren have wronged the members of the RIAA and the MPAA. But record companies and the movie industry aren't the only ones victimized by school children. Literally millions of school papers are written every year, containing billions of quotations and materials, some quoted at length, and virtually none of those papers asked the original creator for permission. What have we become?
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  > What have we become? A nation of thieves. Actually, seems we started that way.
  - Ygg2 13y ago
    I'm pretty sure that's Australia, right? America started as land of religious zealots.
    - MikeCapone 13y ago
      Tell that to the U.S. founding fathers...
    - VLM 13y ago
      The people who were here thousands of years before Puritan nutcases started getting dumped here to get them away from the civilized people, would beg to disagree, if they hadn't mostly been genocided away. Thats probably what OP was referencing. America started as a bunch of vaguely Asiatic foragers crossed over more or less in Alaska a couple thousand years ago. The noob bible thumpers arriving a couple centuries ago wiped out the first wave pretty effectively but they hardly "started it".
anigbrowl 13y ago
From the Grade 1 lesson: [Select two students who are outgoing and will be able to enjoy this activity. Send the students on a quick (30 seconds) errand before they start drawing. Example: “Please run this note to the library.” When the students leave, tell the class you want them to all copy one of the pictures being drawn on the white board. Remind the class to copy the artwork without telling the volunteer artists.] What. I personally think that teachers who can't/won't draft their own lesson plans need to be fired. I still can't get over the fact that American textbooks also come in teacher editions with the answers to exercises provided so that the teacher doesn't have to work them out. The grade 5 materials are more reasonable, suggesting reliance on resources like creative commons or voluntary sharing, and using real-world examples of people who work in the arts not getting paid. These are just factual; a lot of indie movies only get made because the cast & crew workf or free in exchange for an ownership interest. As pointed out below though, they don't include any discussion of fair use or the notion that copyright should exist for limited times.
- mikegagnon 13y ago
  Yes, that lesson plan is outrageous. But no, it's not outrageous that lessons plans exist and are shared in general.
- VLM 13y ago
  Not as simple as "can't/won't". There's also "not allowed to". If the only purpose of education is to teach to a test, and the board selects the book which was written for the test... it does kinda destroy teacher's individuality, but since that seems to be a goal... Some other examples of rather finely defined lesson plans nearly to the point of reading a teleprompter are "human growth and development" which is finely crafted to keep the religious nutcases under control, and "nutrition" which is pretty much whatever the farm lobby wants to sell and anything related to illegal drugs/tobacco/alcohol. There is very little point in firing a teacher for teaching to a lesson plan if the board that hired the teacher very nearly dictated exactly what to say. Any replacement would simply be somewhat less rebellious and more authoritarian, not exactly an improvement.
  - 13y ago
mav3r1ck 13y ago
I know javajosh would agree, but seriously, is no one else extremely disturbed by the clear implications of this 'plot'? So basically, a group of corporations can't get people to behave the way they want them to. So their idea is to literally influence the educational curriculum in the hopes that future generations will behave exactly the way they want them to. This is probably just the tip of the iceberg on our already extremely broken education system. This is what we publicly know. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if oil companies are inserting into geology class that global warming is a hoax. In much the same way we have separation of church and state, perhaps we should consider having a separation of corporation and state. The government's interest should solely rest with the electorate. Although we legally consider corporations people, they most certainly cannot vote and therefore they should have no influence whatsoever on government. I know I am speaking from an idealist point of view, but the government's interests should never be aligned with corporations at the expense of the voting electorate. Which is exactly the problem with what the copyright cartel is doing.
- WalterBright 13y ago
  > I am speaking from an idealist point of view, The government point of view of schools is hardly ideal. There are plenty of examples of those in power in government using the schools to push their own agenda. Not only that, even the notion of a common curriculum can be injustice. One good for one group of people can be injustice for another. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_assimilation_of_Native_Americans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_assimilation_of_Native...
- 3825 13y ago
  How would we enforce a separation of corporation and the state? From what I know, the separation of the Church and the state is to stop the government from interfering with matters of the Church. We don't even have a mechanism to restrict the Church from interfering with the state besides taking away a privilege of tax-exempt status. I am not restriction is a bad idea. I am just not sure how it is achievable.
  - jcromartie 13y ago
tpainton 13y ago
religious indoctrination? from the California teachers union? Now that is funny.
IvyMike 13y ago
This will probably work just about as well as D.A.R.E. did to convince Californians to not take drugs.
- seiji 13y ago
  Don't Copy That Floppy
- gojomo 13y ago
  Yep. DARE: widely recognized as ineffective, maybe even increases drug use: http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/03/dare-americas-most-famous-anti-drug-prog http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/03/dare-americas-most-famous-...
jackschultz 13y ago
I'm actually impressed at how slanted the title is. Using the words "cartel" and "indoctrinate" hits on two major scare points and we don't even have to read a word of the article. Very tough for me to trust what they have to say since they didn't think the words themselves were convincing enough.
- emiliobumachar 13y ago
  "Cartel" seems like a distortion to me, too, but "indoctrinate" seems like a perfectly valid label for the attempt to systematically teach small children to support a political stance. If you wouldn't call that true indoctrination, what would qualify?
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Respecting a widely acknowledged property right isn't a political stance. Nor is it indoctrination to teach kids to respect other peoples work.
    - emiliobumachar 13y ago
      Respecting a widely acknowledged property right is a political stance when widely acknowledged exceptions to that right are left aside. There's also the controversial subtopic of draconian policing of violations of those rights in recent years. Copyright is not a topic for small children. Adults are barely grown up enough to discuss it. EDIT: Forgot to mention the also controversial subtopic of expiration and lack thereof.
    - aric 13y ago
      It is exactly indoctrination.
    - drdeca 13y ago
      If I remember correctly, on the last day of student senate my junior year of high school(the only day I have been to it), they described their plan for the first one or two days of the next year using the term indoctrinate wrt "school spirit". They didn't seem to see anything strange about that. It's possible they used a slightly different word, but I am probably more than 90% sure that at the time I thought they had just said indoctrinate. (note:I am only a senior in highschool, just in case that is useful in explaining why I think things or why I don't have as much experience with things, etc.)
AmiiJewels 13y ago
I am going to flip this around... we should be teaching children the basics of research, citation, fair use and permission at a young level. By encouraging children to go off and research and create I hypothesis that they will naturally lean towards simple, creative commons and other "free" or "libre" licenses and start to actively seek these out in favour of more tightly controlled, restrictive, corporate licensing schemes. Teaching them how to cite, what fair use is and how to ask seek permission from content authors gives them the tools to fight overly restrictive copyright laws - and hopefully, one day, abolish them in favour of sane, time bounded licenses
Ygg2 13y ago
I find this appropriate http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9_hWoGrxWg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9_hWoGrxWg
arh68 13y ago
Comedy gold: >Artists are “graded” or valued by how many people buy their work. >We hope others will respect our work ... And we ‘play fair’ with their work too. No mention of Melchior Rietveldt, Patrick Robin, of course. And certainly nothing like Courtney Love Does The Math.

111 points by timw6n 13y ago

joliv 13y ago

The doesn't seem HORRIBLE: although it may not be good that external companies are influencing the curriculum, an understanding of copyright seems like an idea that is understandable for the CSLA to want to teach in some regard.

timw6n 13y ago
I agree that giving kids an accurate understanding is important — the problem with these teaching materials is that they're being very selective in which parts of copyright law that they teach: According to the linked article, there's no mention of Fair Use provisions, which the record industry would much rather you didn't take advantage of, in the curriculum at all.
- 3825 13y ago
  I submit that an understanding of taxation and representative democracy is more important. We cannot teach everything in school. Class time is a limited resource and wasting it on copyright and what not is a clear abomination. I'd rather kids learned more useful things like learning to read, write, and do arithmetic.
- jackalope 13y ago
  And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I blew my stack when my child was assigned this worksheet from the the RIAA's Music Rules! program as homework: http://www.music-rules.com/pdf/MusicRulesElemActivities.pdf http://www.music-rules.com/pdf/MusicRulesElemActivities.pdf Part 2 is particularly egregious: "Now find out if songlifting is a real problem in your community. Use this chart to interview family members and friends about where they get their music. Bring your findings back to class and combine them with those of your classmates." Really?!! You want our children to compile a list of family and friends (identified by age only, but still...) that you believe are breaking the law and hand it in as signed homework? I complained immediately about this not-so-subtle indoctrination and provided the teacher with a link to the EFF's more balanced and accurate Teaching Copyright site at http://www.teachingcopyright.org/ http://www.teachingcopyright.org/. Songlifting. Give me a break...
  - noonespecial 13y ago
    I sense the approach of Mike Godwin on this one.
mikegagnon 13y ago
I find the scheme abominable because corporations are attempting to mold the unconscious minds of elementary school students to morally support specific political policies (viz. copyright). And they're using public education as the distribution method for their propaganda.

jmgrosen 13y ago

Brave New World, anybody?

aqme28 13y ago
How exactly?

lawnchair_larry 13y ago

We should be far more worried about religious indoctrination than this.

kintamanimatt 13y ago
I'm not sure one is worse than the other. Politically motivated indoctrination and religious indoctrination both cripple minds.
seiji 13y ago
I'd love to see people stand up to Big Religion, but... how? Religion is institutionalized mental and physical child abuse and everybody seems a-okay with all of it.
- VLM 13y ago
  An inaccurate claim at the end given the trend toward irreligion in the united states. The wikipedia article of the same title is a pretty good summary.
- ars 13y ago
  > everybody seems a-okay with all of it. Because it's not abuse. Since when did it become socially acceptable to be bigoted in public? If you want to be intolerant at least keep your nastiness to yourself.
  - derleth 13y ago
    So telling little gay kids that they were born broken and are going to Hell isn't abuse? Don't you dare say that it doesn't happen or that it doesn't matter. Don't you dare.
    - drdeca 13y ago
      To me it seems like calling that the fault of "religion" seems roughly analogous to blaming the concept of "government" for the actions of a specific city or state/province government? (that is, either 1 or 2 levels below a national government , though I might have made a mistake with the analogy there) Not all religions/versions of a religion are the same. I acknowledge that an analogy is not always a particularly strong argument, but it was the first responce I thought of, and it seemed an acceptable responce to me. Also, it might have made more sense to respond a few levels up, not sure what would have made the most sense to reply to.

javajosh 13y ago

Yes, it has angered me for many years - and has been a bitter regret my entire life - that my public school basically forced me to break the law for so many years, and never more egregiously than when I made my collages. To all of the authors, photographers, and publishers of the many magazines and newspapers that I defaced and stole from: I am so, so sorry. I never realized that it was your work, your life blood, and your property that I was so recklessly and wantonly stealing from. My teachers never even mentioned the word "copyright" and I had no idea I had to ask your permission, individually. Of course, ignorance of the law is no excuse, even for a young child, and now I have to live with the shame and the guilt every day. There are many ways that America's schoolchildren have wronged the members of the RIAA and the MPAA. But record companies and the movie industry aren't the only ones victimized by school children. Literally millions of school papers are written every year, containing billions of quotations and materials, some quoted at length, and virtually none of those papers asked the original creator for permission. What have we become?

foobarbazqux 13y ago
> What have we become? A nation of thieves. Actually, seems we started that way.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure that's Australia, right? America started as land of religious zealots.
  - MikeCapone 13y ago
    Tell that to the U.S. founding fathers...
  - VLM 13y ago
    The people who were here thousands of years before Puritan nutcases started getting dumped here to get them away from the civilized people, would beg to disagree, if they hadn't mostly been genocided away. Thats probably what OP was referencing. America started as a bunch of vaguely Asiatic foragers crossed over more or less in Alaska a couple thousand years ago. The noob bible thumpers arriving a couple centuries ago wiped out the first wave pretty effectively but they hardly "started it".

anigbrowl 13y ago

From the Grade 1 lesson: [Select two students who are outgoing and will be able to enjoy this activity. Send the students on a quick (30 seconds) errand before they start drawing. Example: “Please run this note to the library.” When the students leave, tell the class you want them to all copy one of the pictures being drawn on the white board. Remind the class to copy the artwork without telling the volunteer artists.] What. I personally think that teachers who can't/won't draft their own lesson plans need to be fired. I still can't get over the fact that American textbooks also come in teacher editions with the answers to exercises provided so that the teacher doesn't have to work them out. The grade 5 materials are more reasonable, suggesting reliance on resources like creative commons or voluntary sharing, and using real-world examples of people who work in the arts not getting paid. These are just factual; a lot of indie movies only get made because the cast & crew workf or free in exchange for an ownership interest. As pointed out below though, they don't include any discussion of fair use or the notion that copyright should exist for limited times.

mikegagnon 13y ago
Yes, that lesson plan is outrageous. But no, it's not outrageous that lessons plans exist and are shared in general.
VLM 13y ago
Not as simple as "can't/won't". There's also "not allowed to". If the only purpose of education is to teach to a test, and the board selects the book which was written for the test... it does kinda destroy teacher's individuality, but since that seems to be a goal... Some other examples of rather finely defined lesson plans nearly to the point of reading a teleprompter are "human growth and development" which is finely crafted to keep the religious nutcases under control, and "nutrition" which is pretty much whatever the farm lobby wants to sell and anything related to illegal drugs/tobacco/alcohol. There is very little point in firing a teacher for teaching to a lesson plan if the board that hired the teacher very nearly dictated exactly what to say. Any replacement would simply be somewhat less rebellious and more authoritarian, not exactly an improvement.
- 13y ago

mav3r1ck 13y ago

I know javajosh would agree, but seriously, is no one else extremely disturbed by the clear implications of this 'plot'? So basically, a group of corporations can't get people to behave the way they want them to. So their idea is to literally influence the educational curriculum in the hopes that future generations will behave exactly the way they want them to. This is probably just the tip of the iceberg on our already extremely broken education system. This is what we publicly know. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if oil companies are inserting into geology class that global warming is a hoax. In much the same way we have separation of church and state, perhaps we should consider having a separation of corporation and state. The government's interest should solely rest with the electorate. Although we legally consider corporations people, they most certainly cannot vote and therefore they should have no influence whatsoever on government. I know I am speaking from an idealist point of view, but the government's interests should never be aligned with corporations at the expense of the voting electorate. Which is exactly the problem with what the copyright cartel is doing.

WalterBright 13y ago
> I am speaking from an idealist point of view, The government point of view of schools is hardly ideal. There are plenty of examples of those in power in government using the schools to push their own agenda. Not only that, even the notion of a common curriculum can be injustice. One good for one group of people can be injustice for another. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_assimilation_of_Native_Americans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_assimilation_of_Native...
3825 13y ago
How would we enforce a separation of corporation and the state? From what I know, the separation of the Church and the state is to stop the government from interfering with matters of the Church. We don't even have a mechanism to restrict the Church from interfering with the state besides taking away a privilege of tax-exempt status. I am not restriction is a bad idea. I am just not sure how it is achievable.
- jcromartie 13y ago

tpainton 13y ago

religious indoctrination? from the California teachers union? Now that is funny.

IvyMike 13y ago

This will probably work just about as well as D.A.R.E. did to convince Californians to not take drugs.

seiji 13y ago
Don't Copy That Floppy
gojomo 13y ago
Yep. DARE: widely recognized as ineffective, maybe even increases drug use: http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/03/dare-americas-most-famous-anti-drug-prog http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/03/dare-americas-most-famous-...

jackschultz 13y ago

I'm actually impressed at how slanted the title is. Using the words "cartel" and "indoctrinate" hits on two major scare points and we don't even have to read a word of the article. Very tough for me to trust what they have to say since they didn't think the words themselves were convincing enough.

emiliobumachar 13y ago
"Cartel" seems like a distortion to me, too, but "indoctrinate" seems like a perfectly valid label for the attempt to systematically teach small children to support a political stance. If you wouldn't call that true indoctrination, what would qualify?
- rayiner 13y ago
  Respecting a widely acknowledged property right isn't a political stance. Nor is it indoctrination to teach kids to respect other peoples work.
  - emiliobumachar 13y ago
    Respecting a widely acknowledged property right is a political stance when widely acknowledged exceptions to that right are left aside. There's also the controversial subtopic of draconian policing of violations of those rights in recent years. Copyright is not a topic for small children. Adults are barely grown up enough to discuss it. EDIT: Forgot to mention the also controversial subtopic of expiration and lack thereof.
  - aric 13y ago
    It is exactly indoctrination.
  - drdeca 13y ago
    If I remember correctly, on the last day of student senate my junior year of high school(the only day I have been to it), they described their plan for the first one or two days of the next year using the term indoctrinate wrt "school spirit". They didn't seem to see anything strange about that. It's possible they used a slightly different word, but I am probably more than 90% sure that at the time I thought they had just said indoctrinate. (note:I am only a senior in highschool, just in case that is useful in explaining why I think things or why I don't have as much experience with things, etc.)

AmiiJewels 13y ago

I am going to flip this around... we should be teaching children the basics of research, citation, fair use and permission at a young level. By encouraging children to go off and research and create I hypothesis that they will naturally lean towards simple, creative commons and other "free" or "libre" licenses and start to actively seek these out in favour of more tightly controlled, restrictive, corporate licensing schemes. Teaching them how to cite, what fair use is and how to ask seek permission from content authors gives them the tools to fight overly restrictive copyright laws - and hopefully, one day, abolish them in favour of sane, time bounded licenses

Ygg2 13y ago

I find this appropriate http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9_hWoGrxWg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9_hWoGrxWg

arh68 13y ago

Comedy gold: >Artists are “graded” or valued by how many people buy their work. >We hope others will respect our work ... And we ‘play fair’ with their work too. No mention of Melchior Rietveldt, Patrick Robin, of course. And certainly nothing like Courtney Love Does The Math.