Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

This is a huge win for piracy. You can't image how many kids these days don't know about piracy. They share account passwords, and split the costs to stream legally, up until the password sharing crackdown. Now, imagine what would happen if you inform them that these evil pirates get everything for free, without geo-blocking, without multiple services to get everything you want, and even pre-release. And inform them to be careful about malware. Man, they gonna research piracy and how to avoid malware in their free time and enjoy piracy to the fullest. Rights Alliance trains the new generation of pirates in Denmark.

This just shows they can't win so they have to resort to brainwashing children.

By understanding the motivations of today’s youth, the anti-piracy group hopes to be in a better position to influence their behavior.

I pirate because I don't get paid the full value of my labor. Pay me more and I'll buy more goods and services. It's also more convenient to have everything in one place.

That's awesome news. Teaching them about anti-piracy will lead them to piracy and make sure that piracy will remain for future generations.

I would, in fact, download a car

Well, let's see... At my school, smoking was bad. I started smoking. My school taught us that drinking alcohol was very bad. I started drinking with my friends. We learned at school that the USSR was going to attack us with nukes at any moment. So I started doing an annoying impersonation of Boris and Natascha every time we had a "hide under your desk drill" that was quite entertaining. We were warned in social studies class about the dangers of using fireworks and cherry bombs. My friends and I were on the constant hunt of old cherry bombs. Ronald Reagan's administration started a physical fitness program that gave awards to kids that passed a certain test in gym glass. A lot of us didn't try hard on purpose because it looked silly and many of us, to our shock, still won the award because it was too easy. So, perhaps the schools are creating a whole new generation of super pirates. Some of those kids probably don't even know what pirating is. They'll find out now. And don't forget, boys and girls, ketchup is a vegetable. If ketchup is a vegetable, relish is, too. So make sure you eat up all your relish we give you at lunch time, with some ketchup on top.

I would love to see what actual academics in this field have to say about course material for children that equates copyright infringement with theft. I imagine it wouldn't be good.

Having a few comments on record about this issue might help steer schools away from adopting it.

”Are you a thief?”

Yes.

I'm sure this shit would've gone over well with teenage me who downloaded all his games and music using P2P software.

McGruffy the Anti-Piracy Crime dog asks you a question, “You wouldn’t download a car, would you?”.
This will turn out just as well as the DARE program did, it will only inspire kids into researching more about pirating. As they say, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

So you mean there are all these movies, media, software that I can get for free, when I'm too broke to purchase it or subscribe to it and my parents wont buy it?

It's like DARE, only that the drugs are actually free this time.

Wow, openly letting corpos propogandize children.

DONT COPY THAT FLOPPY

Intellectual property is theft

If I was ever a parent of someone being taught anti-piracy lessons in school, I'd have to show him the error of the lessons by showing him the money I'd be saving by pirating and telling him that the money I don't spend on large companies will in fact not kill them. Gotta set a good example.

I'm sure this will about as effective as D. A. R. E. in American schools and keeping people off drugs

The last sentence suggests that, in some cases, pirates can get content sooner than their paying counterparts. This availability issue is often seen as a main driver of piracy. While improvements can be made on the supply side, the course urges teens to postpone their needs instead.

Really? Who would've guessed that piracy is a service problem? How about you improve your shit so people don't feel inclined to pirate it. Who's gonna pay for a shittier experience?

Are you a thief?

I think that when they define "thief" as someone who will watch a TV show on Dailymotion when there's no other way to get it, they're going to be surprised how many people (especially schoolkids) are willing to say "Yes, I'm a thief."

If by "thief" you mean someone that copies information, then yes I am.

I hope the discussions immediately turn to better questions like “what does it mean to own an idea or a blueprint or a sound.”

Stop all the downloadin’

I mean they’d already told us it’s like stealing a car, I thought we’d accepted that and moved on (with all our free cars).

We can teach them about how once-upon-a-time common sense copyright laws got perverted by the mouse so badly.

I tell kids these days they are totally in one of those YAF novels where the teachers and ministers and testers (and even parents) are all in on the plot to force you through a doughboy program that turns you into an interchangeable, disposable, replaceable soldier or laborer to be exploited and discarded in some billionaire's vanity project, all the while the world is covered in plastic residue and is liberally burning.

IP maximalist indoctrination feels entirely on par, especially considering how disengagement is a far greater threat to media industries than piracy.

Incidentally, IP infringement, including copyright infringement is never theft. Cheating creators and developers of a fair share of the profits, however, is theft.