Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Woody Guthrie once said:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ours, cause we don't give a darn. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.

Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons fame held a lecture at the Hans Christian Andersen Academy at the University of Southern Denmark (tip from Keld Bach). If you read Danish there is background information available. Otherwise you can just jump directly to the video of the lecture (55 minutes; Windows Media Player required).

The lecture sounds like something Lessig has said fifteen million times before, and I'm sure there's not a lot of news for people who've heard him recently. However it's great to see that a Danish university is inviting people like him to speak. Now we just need some lawyers to get started in translating the Creative Commons license legal code into Danish (and make it work with Danish legislation of course). I can see that Finland has finished and Sweden are working on it.

Today us in the European Union get to elect a new European Parliament. I did my civil duty as a member of a democracy by voting, even though I had to bike south to another city to do so. I suspect I would have been more annoyed by it had it not been a beautiful sunshiny day today.

Right now my tv tells me that 97% of the votes have been counted and it looks like the candidate I voted for got a place in the parliament. Of course I'm pleased when my party goes up by one percent. I voted for Margrete Auken — a pro-EU socialist. She's pretty cool and likes the enviroment which is a big plus in my book. Auken even has a weblog (powered by the open source software Wordpress). I don't know if she has stolen the idea from John Kerry — and earlier Howard Dean. Either way Auken's weblog is better executed for the simple reason that she writes her own entries. This brings forward the number one quality about weblogs: The fact that they are personal accounts, but your press secretary's account.

The big question today has been the election turnout. Only 47,9% voted in Denmark making this election look like an American presidential election. I would much prefer to have the 80% turnout that is the norm for elections to the national parliament.

The logo above was taken from the brochure “The European Parliament explained” (available in pdf format from the election website). Fortunately the European Union has a very liberal copyright notice which allows me to reproduce anything from their website as long as I acknowledge the source.

If you display a lack of intelligence will you lose your intellectual property?

Should you?

Manual Comments™ on this entry:

From Dave:

You shouldn't lose your property, you should forfeit your right to participate in many aspects of human interation!

It reminds me of the police car crawling through the caravan park where we were staying over Easter. As they moved past our site I called out to them, “excuse me officer, there's a guy over here under his IQ limit!” The cop quickly stopped the car as what I had said filtered through his system and my friend sat there sputtering with no response! It was a moment to be proud of as everyone laughed at him and the cop offered to take him away.

According to this article in The Boston Globe (Slashdot thread) some schools in the USA thought it to be a good idea to have the Motion Picture Association of America to teach copyright law to middle schoolers. This is wrong on so many levels.

There are the obvious problems in this case. The pupils are not being informed on their rights as a part of the public, and are only taught that “If you don't pay for it, you've stolen it.” That is of course flat out wrong. It's not theft — the owner hasn't “lost” anything — it's copyright infringement. And most importantly you, as a part of the public, have a wide range of rights.

Then there are the contests (emphasis mine):

At the end of the school year, students are asked to write an essay “to get the word out that downloading copyrighted entertainment is illegal and unethical,” according to the teachers' guide. Prizes include an all-expenses-paid trip to Hollywood, worth about $1,000; a Sony DVD player and library of 14 hit movies on DVDs, worth about $350 total; and a selection of 21 Hollywood classic DVDs, valued at $250. Teachers whose students win the contest will also be rewarded with prizes, such as a year's worth of free movie theater tickets for the teacher and a guest.

Not only are they paying the children to share their political views the MPAA is effectively bribing teachers. This is where the real problem starts. The problem is not that the MPAA is trying to influence people (though trying to influence chlidren this young is not cool in my book). You get that every day with posters, tv commercials and those annoying people on the street who wants your signature on a piece of paper.

It's not a problem that an interest group is trying to sway the public view. It's a huge problem when an interest group is trying to forward their own political agenda using educational discourse in a school context. The schools are supposed to give a fair and balanced view on any topic. The schools are supposed to ensure that pupils learn to think critically. Programs like this (especially when teachers are bribed) take away the integrity of the school system.

You as a parent have to question everything the school teaches your child because the school can't be trusted. Your children certainly can't tell the difference between the teacher talking about the second world war and the MPAA lackeys giving a political indoctrination using educational discourse in a school context. They look like teachers, they talk like teachers and they run around in schools, but they are not actually teaching anything. Children can't tell them apart.

This is not how the educational system should work. The schools have to remain 100% free of commercial and political interest groups. Yes, that means McDonald's and sponsored soda deals must be removed from schools as well. They are not acting with the public good in mind — they have their own commercial agendas.

In other news: Coke Educates on Morality of Drinking Tap Water (a satirical analogy on this topic).