proving hollywood are trying to influence the young to sway them from pirating and internet downloading
America's No 1 enforcement officer, federal attorney general Alberto Gonzales, is on the road as part of a deeply cynical dog-and-pony show set up by the Big Four record labels and Big Six movie studios, but implemented by the Bush administration.
He's visiting schools with horror stories of what'll happen if kids don't buy entertainment cartel product.
"I hope you never have the misfortune to deal with me as a result of engaging in something you shouldn't be doing," he warned 7th and 8th graders at Windmill Springs Elementary school in San Jose, California, states CBS News. "Illegally downloading music, movies and software is a form of stealing," he said, demonstrating his own appalling ignorance of the laws he's supposed to uphold.
No theft is involved, and file sharing isn't a criminal matter, efforts by the cartels to elevate it to that level notwithstanding. It's a civil one and what's at issue isn't if someone's broken a law. It's whether or not he or she has infringed a copyright, which is a very long way from "criminal" or "illegal".
Nonetheless, Gonzales' scare 'em all campaign is part of a week long program, "in which the kids studied Internet dangers as well as the moral, social and legal implications of Internet piracy".
"I am the top cop in the United States,'' he declared, says the San Jose Mercury News.
Nor is this farce costing Warner Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Vivendi Universal, on the music side, or, studios Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, one red cent.
Rather, American taxpayers are having to foot the enormous bills for these, and similar, wholly corporate escapades without a murmur from parents, the media, or anyone else.
Downloading a song for free from a file-sharing Web site, Gonzales declared, "is just like stealing blue jeans or copying off a neighbor's (school) paper".
It's a, "tough message to sell to pre-adolescents, but the Justice Department is apparently going for a 'get 'em while they're young' approach as the best long-term remedy for rampant online piracy," the story goes on.
"It certainly wasn't a typical school day, as Secret Service agents with earpieces checked campus buildings, a bomb-sniffing dog roamed the halls and TV crews interviewed packs of giggly students.
"The program started Tuesday with the students, ages 12 to 14, designing a Web site. It continued Wednesday with students testing a new educational computer game. 'AirDogs,' distributed by Web Wise Kids of Santa Ana, teaches middle-schoolers to avoid cybercrime activities such as credit-card theft and re-selling stolen notebook computers.
"The finale came Thursday with a four-hour assembly in the cafeteria, recorded by Court TV for an upcoming documentary, as the students slouched on uncushioned brown metal folding chairs."
Unbelievable.
File sharing doesn't involve theft.
Nothing has been stolen and no one has been deprived of anything they used to own.
No money changes hands.
The phony 'educational efforts and lawsuits launched by the entertainment cartels against their own customers are achieving nothing. In fact, every day more and more people are going online and accessing the p2p file sharing networks, as the Big Champagne statistics on the left clearly demonstrate.
Big Champagne collects and collates music and other data and its numbers show the average number of users simultaneously logged into the US and international p2p networks at any given time.
Moreover, neither Hollywood nor the Big Four Organized Music cartel have ever come even close to demonstrating that a file shared equals a sale lost and in fact, as far as the labels are concerned, a report which has just hit the Net says unequivocally, "lawsuits against individual consumers, payola practices, and, most recently, restrictive use of digital rights management" are the cause of their problems.
Do you believe people who share files with each other online are 'thieves' and 'criminals' as the CRIA [Canadian Recording Industry Association of America], et al, claim? - p2pnet asked internationally respected Canadian internet and copyright expert Dr Michael Geist.
"No," he stated flatly.
Does a download equal a lost sale? - we asked.
"No," he said. "I don't think anybody would argue that it does. Even the Copyright Board of Canada has valued a downloaded song as a lesser value that the CD version for purposes of the private copying levy."
Are file sharers and counterfeiters equally and jointly responsible for entertainment and software industry downturns, as the CRIA and other trade-cum-PR units suggest repeatedly? - p2pnet asked.
"I don't think file sharers and counterfeiters should be equated - there is a significant difference between the two," Geist responded.
Should the cartels be allowed to have a definite presence in schools and universities via their so-called 'educational' programs? – we wondered.
"I think it's up to the schools to ensure that their students gain a balanced perspective on these issues," declared Geist. "Educators wouldn't tolerate commercial messaging in other areas and shouldn't here either. It's essential that educators take that role seriously by educating their students on the full range of copyright issues including their user rights to use works without prior permission."
As p2pnet reader Sandro says, "I'm in favour of educating kids.
"Let the US attorney General bring New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer along with him for a crash course on industry payola, control of distribution channels and price fixing."
