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I'd never heard of these IP lessons.

In 2003-4 the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) spent more than $200,000 on an ‘educational’ course for schoolchildren, bizarrely entitled ‘What’s the Diff? A Guide to Digital Citizenship’. This was nothing more than a lesson in IP dogma. ‘If you haven’t paid for it, you’ve stolen it,’ students were told – eliding fair use, public domain works, Free Software, and alternative licensing in one sweep of the revisionist hand. Teachers worked from a -page classroom guide, explaining that the use of a computer to download files was ‘morally and ethically wrong.’ Students played roles such as ‘The Film Producer’ and ‘The Starving Artist’; at the end of one session, according to an article in the Boston Globe, a teacher asked a boy: ‘’Will you stop copying music online and download the right way?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘I’ll go to the music store and buy more CDs.’1 Alongside the propaganda comes bribery: for writing essays about why file sharing is bad, students are offered incentives such as free DVD players and DVDs (first one’s free, but they’re hooked forever), movie tickets and trips to Hollywood.

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Read more from this blogger: Don’t Copy That Floppy: IP Propaganda