Hollywood reaching out to US campuses to fight piracy
( 2003-10-24 16:55) (Agencies)
Hollywood is reaching out to US campuses to preach its anti-piracy ideas by
offering teachers and students prizes for spreading its message against on-line
music and movie piracy, a company implementing the program said Thursday.
The program, entitled "What's the Diff?: A Guide to Digital Citizenship," was
launched last week by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which
paid 100,000 US dollars to deliver its anti-piracy message to 900,000 students
nationwide in grades 5 to 9 over the next two years, the Junior Achievement Inc.
said.Junior Achievement offers students DVD players, DVD movies, theater tickets
and all-expenses-paid trips to Hollywood for winning essays about the
illegalities of file-sharing.
Teachers, too, can win prizes for effectively communicating the approved
message in classrooms.The major aim of the program was to keep kids away from
Internet services like Kazaa that let users trade digital songs and film clips.
The MPAA message is"MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor said the MPAA thought the
students are "a critical group to be having this conversation with." "If we sit
idly by and we don't have a conversation with the general public of all ages, we
could one day look back at October of 2003 as the good old days of piracy," he
said.David Chernow, Junior Achievement's chief executive, said the explosion of
peer-to-peer activity among young people is a frequent topic for public school
classrooms.
"We're really trying to teach young people to be responsible and to obey laws
that they may not understand," Chernow said.Beginning Friday, public service
announcements will be released to approximately 5,000 theaters nationwide,
profiling people in the movie industry and arguing that digital piracy threatens
their livelihoods.
The MPAA said that the entertainment industry is in "a state of crisis" due
to increasing digital piracy of music and movie products.But some school
officials were worried about the company's presence in classrooms. Melinda
Anderson, a spokeswoman for the National Education Association, said it was
unsettling when corporate presence in the classroom is tethered to sponsored
incentive programs.
Meanwhile, the MPAA settled on Thursday a controversy over the ban on mailing
out screener videotapes and DVDs of films contending for Oscar awards to Oscar
voting members.The ban, imposed on Sept. 30 with an aim to fight movie piracy,
was partially reversed by the MPAA due to protests from independent filmmakers
who said the ban could greatly reduce their chances of winning Oscar
awards.
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