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UK IP Chief Wants Schools to Teach Copyright Ethics and Morals


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The UK's top IP advisor has published recommendations on how today's youth should learn to respect copyright. The document envisions a mandatory copyright curriculum for all ages, online awareness campaigns, and a copyright education program run by the BBC.

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Mike Weatherley, a Conservative MP and Intellectual Property Adviser to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, has pushed various copyright related topics onto the political agenda over the past year.

Previously Weatherley suggested that ISPs should be held responsible for pirating users, that search engines should blacklist pirate sites and that persistent file-sharers should be thrown in jail.

Ideally, however, UK citizens shouldn’t be sharing or downloading content without permission to begin with. This is an issue the IP-advisor hopes to resolve with his latest set of recommendations, which center around copyright education and awareness.

In a 51-page report (pdf) that was just released Weatherley stresses the importance of copyright awareness and education, especially for the younger generation. This is needed as respect for copyright has declined in recent years and some even believe that sharing copyrighted material without permission is not a big deal.

“There is … a certain level of tolerance for the idea that IP infringements could be considered legitimate. Some believe that illegal activity online is a social norm, with no moral implications,” Weatherley writes.

“We are at risk of an entire generation growing up with different levels of respect for IP and copyright in particular. Should this social contract disappear, there could be longer-term consequences beyond the immediate, short-term negative impacts experienced by the creative sector,” he adds.

In his report the IP-advisor makes several recommendations for how this trend can be countered. Through a broad set of education measures he hopes that copyright will regain respect from the public.

“Education and consumer awareness programmes that seek to change current behaviour or influence future actions are essential for nurturing a greater culture of respect and value for the UK’s creative economy, and to negate the impact of infringement.”

The report mentions that several of the education efforts have already been set in motion. This includes PIPCU’s warning banners on pirate sites as well as the upcoming scheme to warn alleged copyright infringers through their ISP.

One of the future goals is to bring copyright into the classroom. To achieve this Weatherley recommends to add copyright education to the school curriculum, starting with the youngest kids in primary school.

“The school curriculum needs to prepare pupils – from early years through to the end of secondary school and higher education – for the 21st century knowledge economy. Interaction with IP is a daily occurrence for many young people, and yet it is widely ignored within the education system,” the report reads.

As a secondary form of public education, the BBC should also start broadcasting programming that stresses the value of copyright through various channels. This to ensure that the message reaches a wide audience.

“Given its reach and public service broadcasting remit, the BBC should create a copyright education programme using online, on-air and face-to-face channels,” Weatherley recommends.

With these initiatives and other changes, the IP advisor hopes to change people’s attitudes towards copyright. This should then lead to less online piracy in the long run which may reflect positively on the economy.

Unfortunately, the report doesn’t mention who should be involved in creating the educational messages, should they be implemented. The only stakeholders that have been consulted recently are the major copyright holder groups, which may lead to a biased perspective.

To avoid an unbalanced curriculum as we’ve seen in the United States, it may be wise to also involve representatives from the consumer side, library organisations, or alternatives to strict copyright licensing such as Creative Commons.

Source: TorrentFreak

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yeh righto most of the "Download Pirates" are under 18 like they are going to take any notice

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The indea is good, it's good to teach the youngsters some real life things, like protecting others work. So +1 for education.

Why are people so pro for piracy, I don't understand. Most of the "pirates" don't understand why they are doing it. Most of people who illegally download software or any kind of copyrighted material do it for educational purpose only. You are downloading Office to learn how to use it, not to make money from the work you're doing with it, so it's nothing wrong to do so, and most of the companies understood this, that's why they are now offering free software for students.

The problem is when someone steal someone else's work, and try to gain profit from it, and some so called pirates are baking them up, because they don't realy understand the difference between stealing someone else's work and learing how to use someone else's work.

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The indea is good, it's good to teach the youngsters some real life things, like protecting others work. So +1 for education.

Why are people so pro for piracy, I don't understand. Most of the "pirates" don't understand why they are doing it. Most of people who illegally download software or any kind of copyrighted material do it for educational purpose only. You are downloading Office to learn how to use it, not to make money from the work you're doing with it, so it's nothing wrong to do so, and most of the companies understood this, that's why they are now offering free software for students.

The problem is when someone steal someone else's work, and try to gain profit from it, and some so called pirates are baking them up, because they don't realy understand the difference between stealing someone else's work and using someone else's work.

Sorry but I think you're on the wrong site if you consider any type of copying as "stealing".

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The indea is good, it's good to teach the youngsters some real life things, like protecting others work. So +1 for education.

Why are people so pro for piracy, I don't understand. Most of the "pirates" don't understand why they are doing it. Most of people who illegally download software or any kind of copyrighted material do it for educational purpose only. You are downloading Office to learn how to use it, not to make money from the work you're doing with it, so it's nothing wrong to do so, and most of the companies understood this, that's why they are now offering free software for students.

The problem is when someone steal someone else's work, and try to gain profit from it, and some so called pirates are baking them up, because they don't realy understand the difference between stealing someone else's work and using someone else's work.

Sorry but I think you're on the wrong site if you consider any type of copying as "stealing".

Am I? how many companies/people stole other companies/people code or parts of the code and used it with a different name? Isn't that called "making a copy" of the original? How many publications used someone else's pictures and made money from viewers? The one who made the pictures didn't got any cent from that, isn't that pirating? Piracy doesn't refer only at software, it refer at any kind of digital data.

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What you thing that piracy means, will never stop, it will stop only when the labor market won't have any requirements, and the software devs know it really well, since this is how they became software developers, using softwares just for educational purpose. But teaching youngsters about what's right and wrong will never be in vain.

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The indea is good, it's good to teach the youngsters some real life things, like protecting others work. So +1 for education.

Why are people so pro for piracy, I don't understand. Most of the "pirates" don't understand why they are doing it. Most of people who illegally download software or any kind of copyrighted material do it for educational purpose only. You are downloading Office to learn how to use it, not to make money from the work you're doing with it, so it's nothing wrong to do so, and most of the companies understood this, that's why they are now offering free software for students.

The problem is when someone steal someone else's work, and try to gain profit from it, and some so called pirates are baking them up, because they don't realy understand the difference between stealing someone else's work and using someone else's work.

Sorry but I think you're on the wrong site if you consider any type of copying as "stealing".

Am I? how many companies/people stole other companies/people code or parts of the code and used it with a different name? Isn't that called "making a copy" of the original? How many publications used someone else's pictures and made money from viewers? The one who made the pictures didn't got any cent from that, isn't that pirating? Piracy doesn't refer only at software, it refer at any kind of digital data.

no, you're wrong. taking someone's code and releasing it as your own IS indeed a copyright infringement, but that has NOTHING to do with sharing a copy of MS Office (or some other software) with your friends. noone is taking ownership from the original author! the author can sell it and make money from it, and most people might prefer to get it from the official source (for the added benefits that dealing with the author gives) but once it's out the door, it.is.out! it costs the author or anyone else NOTHING to reproduce it. other than the medium that it is in and it is not removed from the original container. and this comes from a software developer.

and "piracy" (how that little word bothers me) refer to attacking and stealing from a ship in the high seas, which again has NOTHING to do with the sharing of KNOWLEDGE.

and you know what other sense the word "pirate" is used in? in radio, when someone sets up a radio station and start broadcasting (using money from their own pocket for the equipment --not cheap i may add) and they don't have the blessing of the other big stations they try to silence it under the charges of "piracy"

on topic: so rest assured that when you post a random picture or a song somewhere on the internet you are NOT being a "pirate" as long as you don't claim that you are the original creator of it.....but alas, i doubt that's what they will teach the poor UK kids if this thing happens.

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That's because that person didn't pay for the freq he chose to play his station. You don't really get it. It's about who's making the money.

If you make a picture from top of a mountain and publish it in a magazine, and someone else takes youre picture, post it on his magazine, he is making money on your work. That's called pirating. That's not sharing of knowledge that's gaining profit on someone else work. That's why now we are dealing with watermarking, and not the kind of watermark you are used to, but a bit watermark that applies to any digital data, audio, video(which in fact is a bunch of pictures), documents etc.

Pirating issue should have been talked in school like 5 years ago, because is a huge issue. Have you ever heard of DRM?

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a class of technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders, and individuals with the intent to control the use of digital content and devices after sale.

As I said, devs understood the reason of using pirated data, that's why you can get any king of Ms software for free, Matlab, and any kind of software that is required by the labor market, if you are a student and many other companies are heading in this direction.

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The indea is good, it's good to teach the youngsters some real life things, like protecting others work. So +1 for education.

Why are people so pro for piracy, I don't understand. Most of the "pirates" don't understand why they are doing it. Most of people who illegally download software or any kind of copyrighted material do it for educational purpose only. You are downloading Office to learn how to use it, not to make money from the work you're doing with it, so it's nothing wrong to do so, and most of the companies understood this, that's why they are now offering free software for students.

The problem is when someone steal someone else's work, and try to gain profit from it, and some so called pirates are baking them up, because they don't realy understand the difference between stealing someone else's work and using someone else's work.

Sorry but I think you're on the wrong site if you consider any type of copying as "stealing".

Totally agree but since this site is totally open to ANY EYES not a lot can be said.

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Totally agree but since this site is totally open to ANY EYES not a lot can be said.

You agree because you don't really understand the subject. Just because some types of copying aren't equivalent to stealing that doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk about the other side, where one is making tons of money on someone else's back and that individual is dying of hunger at home.

It's not about "Hey, don't download that software, don't use ilegal software and etc", it's about, "hey, if you're going to make money from that software, you need to have full rights for it". But of course, there are too many children who consider pirating cool(because they limit themselves at downloading a software for home use and don't really understand the scale of this issue, where someone is making copies of CDs, DVDs, etc and sell them as originals) and have a 2 cents mentality.

That how fake money are made my friend. That's why you see so many watermarks on the valuable paper. Would you rather go to a store and recive as change fake money, or real money?

That's the subjsect that the "poor UK chlidren will attend", not the " don't activate MS software by Skype", as you may think.

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it's about, "hey, if you're going to make money from that software, you need to have full rights for it".

but that is NOT what has been happening, that is NOT what Mr.Weatherley here have been pushing for. if this person had his way people would be thrown in jail for downloading a song! ...a bloody mp3 file! ..or a movie, or a game, or an ebook, it doesn't matter.

you fail to mention how regular people have been blackmailed into outrageous settlements for downloading a few songs, people that obviously have no reason to turn any profit or claim ownership over them. heck, they don't even hesitate to bully a 9yr old girl . and that's the kind of things you would like schools to teach?

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Totally agree but since this site is totally open to ANY EYES not a lot can be said.

You agree because you don't really understand the subject. Just because some types of copying aren't equivalent to stealing that doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk about the other side, where one is making tons of money on someone else's back and that individual is dying of hunger at home.

It's not about "Hey, don't download that software, don't use ilegal software and etc", it's about, "hey, if you're going to make money from that software, you need to have full rights for it". But of course, there are too many children who consider pirating cool(because they limit themselves at downloading a software for home use and don't really understand the scale of this issue, where someone is making copies of CDs, DVDs, etc and sell them as originals) and have a 2 cents mentality.

That how fake money are made my friend. That's why you see so many watermarks on the valuable paper. Would you rather go to a store and recive as change fake money, or real money?

That's the subjsect that the "poor UK chlidren will attend", not the " don't activate MS software by Skype", as you may think.

What a silly comment, are you trying to teach your Grandfather to suck egg's?? I have been out here since the very early 90's doing what I do and if you had the slightest idea of what I did you would not have made such a silly / stupid comment.

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So what have you been doing? trolling since 90'? Because if I remember well your comments, you have limited view on everything, always commenting how well you know things but never say the exact things that you know.

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As I said with a open site like this it would be very silly to say too much.

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I find myself in complete disagreement with you Alex Cross.

First of all it would be more appropriate for this Conservative MP to issue a report suggesting that "ethics" should be taught to all Bank and major Company executives which would have the potential to save untold billions of pounds for the country. Think about the money that would be saved if those people and their Stock Exchange friends all acted in a totally honest and ethical manner, instead of greedily and anonymously filling their grubby hands, pockets and bank accounts.

Second, I ask again, can anyone quote a figure for the sales of blank DVD's, CD's and Blu Ray disks? And remember that there is a REAL figure there, not some made up figure like the one the music/movie industry invents when talking about "losses" due to piracy. If every one stopped downloading as a result of being taught ethics, the sales of said disks would plummet to about 2% of the current figure and then they'd start crying about that, wanting their bread buttered on both sides.

Thirdly, your example about a photo is too simplistic...do you really think the music/movie industry people are, in the majority, ethically clean people who act in a scrupulously honest manner every day, never fiddling a tax return, never conning young artists into signing away their talented output by means of suffocating contracts, and never doing anything immoral to get even more money than they already receive?

Lastly, the system is that you teach the (working class) kids at school age not to "steal" so that you reduce the number of them who as adults will steal from there masters in the elite privileged group at the top layer of society. Show me a kid who steals as much as a bank manager, or company executive. When was the last time the evidence against a kid was taken into court in the form of stack upon stack of files and ledgers, as happens all too frequently when bankers are investigated for corruption/fraud? This whole "piracy" argument is a smokescreen...it's just greedy powerful people using their (unfair) influence with politicians to safeguard their eternal monopoly of being able to wring the last cent out of anything they can sell to the masses. They'd sell us an Ebola vaccine if they could get away with it.

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Just for the record Alex, I don't buy "pirate" movies /music and nor do I sell "pirate" movies/music. In other words I don't make profit or help others make profit from "piracy". When I was a kid I swapped comics regularly with my friends...I guess I was guilty of "distributing" copyright material without permission in those days...how dangerous Mr Weatherley and those who he represents (probably for a fee) must view me. :angry:

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