Wake Up, Parents! (And Teachers)
Thursday, February 14th, 2008 by Patrick Ross
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Kudos to Microsoft for another educational effort on copyright. It has launched MyBytes, an interactive educational web site for teens, following the results of a depressing survey on the youth's attitude toward the rights of creators. According to reports, the survey found only 11% of teens understood the rules for legal downloading, and their main source of information was their parents. So I guess 89% of parents are confused.
The upside was that Microsoft reported that teens educated in copyright were far less likely to infringe (anecdotally, that applies to my two kids who are at the age of being active online), and that the teens also were open to being educated (I can't look to my kids here, they have no choice but to hear my preaching for artists' rights at the dining room table, in the car, etc.).
So parents are dropping the ball on educating their children, presumably lacking understanding of the law and artists' rights themselves. So how about our schools? An educational blog points out that there really isn't a good place to put it into the curriculum. That has been my feeling as I've reviewed the standards required under No Child Left Behind. Copyright awareness — not just anti-piracy messages but positive messages explaining how everyone is a creator and benefits from copyright — has a place in schools, and we'll just have to work together to find a way to seamlessly integrate it with other important lessons.
