
Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/dokas/102499448/
I picked my daughter from school the other day. As we were driving home she said. “Dad, did you know that downloading is illegal?” I asked her who told her that. She said a teacher told her. I then asked her, what is downloading? Her answer was “when you get movies and songs from the Internet”.
It really upsets me that the MPAA, RIAA and other lobby type groups have the power to actually influence the educational system in this way. It bothers me more that I have teachers teaching my child concepts that they themselves obviously do not understand and probably have read some propaganda from one of these lobby groups and assume that it is truth.
I suspect this is going to surprise some people but … downloading is _NOT_ the process of obtaining movies and songs from the Internet. Downloading _IS_ the transfer of data from one device to another, where the device receiving the data initiated the requested. Sure you can download a movie or a song, but you can also download a word processing document, you can download a database file, you can download a custom graphic, you can download a piece of open-source or free software, you can download anything really. The concept of downloading has nothing to do with what you are downloading.
Is downloading bad? According to my daughter it is. An analogy would be teaching the concept that guns are bad. As a normal citizen in Canada it is illegal to carry a handgun. Any citizen wandering around with a handgun strapped to their belt will have people scared, running away and win themselves a meeting with a police swat team very quickly. If you see a police officer wandering around with a gun on their side, there is no panic, no running away. People just carry on. The gun isn’t bad. It is who has the gun that determines good or bad. As a society we assume that police will only use their guns for good and so seeing a uniformed police officer with a gun is perfectly acceptable. This is one of the reasons why plain clothed officers go to great lengths to hide their side arms, the general public can not be certain they are law enforcement just by looking at them.
With downloading, everyone has the ability to do it and there are no restrictions. It has been and continues to be a normal part of computing since the days when on-line bulletin board systems were popular. The concept of moving data from one device to another is what makes the Internet work. Every time you go read a web page, blog, or watch a news clip from a news site you could argue that you are technically ‘downloading’.
I am now slowly educating my daughter on the concepts of downloading and uploading. Once those are grasped, I’ll work on what is illegal and what is not when using downloading. I hope that if schools and other educational institutions do choose to teach children about why downloading content that you do not own is wrong, they first understand the concepts themselves and teach it properly.