Internet Safety News
Anti-Piracy "Curriculum" for U.S. Students
by Anne Collier
Judging by its source, a "curriculum" to be distributed to 25,000 schools in the United States next month is actually an anti-piracy campaign. In this case the piracy concerns software, not music. The source of the campaign, the Business Software Alliance, represents software companies worldwide. The Alliance says nearly half of all Internet users have downloaded software from the Internet, and 81 percent of those haven't paid for it.1 Software piracy accounted for $10.7 billion in worldwide software-industry losses in 2001.2 The new anti-piracy campaign, "Play It Safe in Cyberspace," was developed for grades three to eight with the Weekly Reader classroom newspaper and includes a teacher's guide, activity sheets, and classroom poster.
In a related story 29-year-old John Sankus is described as a "soft-spoken, churchgoing computer technician who still has the plush stuffed whales from his childhood" and ringleader of an international gang of software pirates who deprived companies of millions of dollars through the illegal distribution of copyrighted software, games, and movies on the Internet.3
1Cara Branigan. "Software
Group's Anti-Piracy Campaign Targets Students." eSchool
News. July 3, 2002, http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=3845.
2Elizabeth Millard. "Steal This Software."
NewsFactor. July 10, 2002, http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18531.html.
3Jennifer Lee. "Pirates of the Web."
The New York Times. July 11, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/11/technology/circuits/11WARE.html.
Anne Collier is editor of the SafeKids/NetFamilyNewsletter and president of NetFamilyNews.org, a nonprofit
