Sep
2009
It would seem that the music industry has decided that the public school systems are the perfect methods to distribute their anti-music propaganda.
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has had a little known program that is free to schools called “Music Rules!“. It appears the program has been around since 2006, but it has recently been announced that the program has been updated, and new materials are available for teachers, students and their parents.
The potential hand outs are written to educate students all about why “songlifting” (like Ars Technica, this is a new term that we’ve never seen make the rounds before) is wrong, respecting intellectual property, how downloading music is like stealing from everyone in the music industry and a bunch of other one-sided arguments. Long story short, the RIAA is trying to convince teachers to turn into propaganda streaming machines for them that will teach children how downloading music for free is bad, Bad, BAD!
Did you notice in that last sentence I said “free” instead of “illegal”? That was done on purpose. One of the stated points in the documentation from the program says:
taking music without paying for it is illegal and unfair to others
Well, there’s a little problem with this as it is painting a very black-and-white picture of the situation. It is true that the majority of “free” music is illegal, but there have been some very notable exceptions to that idea such as Radiohead’s In Rainbows experiment where people could download the album for free if they chose to do so. There have also been free music experiments from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and several others, so it is impossible to say “taking music without paying for it is illegal and unfair to others.”
So, just one little aspect of this whole lesson plan can be picked apart that quickly as being full of holes, do you even really need to question that the rest of this system may be full of holes in logic and bias?
I decided to take this one step further and called my 88-year-old maternal grandmother who is a retired teacher. Her classes were troubled kids in inner city Phoenix, AZ, so it is doubtful this sort of program would have ever crossed her mind at all, but she could as least give me some perspective on how she would have felt giving these sort of handouts that were so clearly corporate propaganda. Well, her answer was pretty simple: “I wouldn’t have.”
It seems that her contract (mind you this was the 1970′s and early 1980′s) clearly stated that she could never express an opinion in her class that would take any sort of position on this type of matter. She said the way she would have handled illegal downloading would have been to wait for a student to mention it in front of her, and then she would have asked them how that made them feel. Her students were the type that were well known for spray painting graffiti and other annoyances, so this was a type of discussion she had on a daily basis with at least one of them.
All that being said, she said she felt these “worksheets” provided by the RIAA would have been a clear violation of her contract, and even if they hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have had anything to do for them for feeling like a shill for corporations and that it also wasn’t what school is about.
And there my grandmother hit the nail on the head for summing up my feelings. School is not about teaching you something quite this specific as “what is intellectual property”, and do you “vow” to never violate it. This is not the sort of thing that students need to be taught in school, on federally funded time. Recently some schools had issues with President Obama speaking to school children because they felt that his speech was going to be a political one that would try to educate children on the health care debate, and many people spoke out about school time being used in this manner.
Lets say this took off, which I highly doubt it will, where would this slippery slope stop? What other corporate backed programs would worm their way into the curriculum of our schools? My feeling is that no program of this type should be allowed in, and I question the teaching credentials of any teacher that would use this program. Can’t think of a lesson plan and fall back to this thing? ”Buh-bye, please leave your teaching certificate at the door.”
The RIAA is rotten to the core, and releasing something this slanted and bias (again I would point you to the “free music” bit), it just shows how off the wall they are. Please, if you hear of any school using this thing, speak out against it because you may agree with this program, but will you with the next one?


Is there any sane person left in the music industry?
The Walt Disney Company has agreed to purchase Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in cash and stock.
As if it wasn’t difficult enough already making sure you get to the post office now, imagine what it’ll be like with 1,000 less of them.
It seems there is a movement out there to cut the standard work week from the familiar five days of 8-hours each to four days of 10-hours each.
I must request that no one calls my cell phone any more.
Well, that was unexpected but welcome.
Apparently no one at KFC, or even Oprah’s Harpo Productions, quite understands the power of Oprah.
It would seem Marvel Comics really doesn’t like you to talk about them… unless they tell you what to say.
Not in the comic book industry though. Oh no, we can’t have you using something they made public themselves without first asking their permission to do it. Apparently they have missed the fact that you can lock a Twitter stream which means that no one is allowed to republish your Tweets. No, they’ll just go on saying things that anyone can see and then get angry when people actually quote them on it.
It’s true folks, Hollywood is in deep crisis… of morals that is.