The producer tells her sad story with her fists curled inside the sleeves of an oversize hooded sweatshirt: "I'm, like, losing my job, and maybe I, like, need that money for my family or something." The cause of her consternation: peer-to-peer file-sharing, which she says is devastating Hollywood.
The "producer" doesn't produce movies any more than the "actor" or "singer" sitting beside her acts or sings. They are all seventh-graders at Sierra Vista Junior High in Southern California's Santa Clarita Valley. They're engaged in a role-playing game, as directed in a lesson plan sponsored and bankrolled by the Motion Picture Association of America. The curriculum - called "What's the Diff?: A Guide to Digital Citizenship" - has reached slightly more than half a million junior high students since it began this school year.
The class is led by Jean Sutton, a volunteer from Junior Achievement, a nonprofit business education group. She hands each student a card that explains what role they are to play - actor, director, producer, singer, computer user, or set builder - and what their viewpoint is supposed to be. "It's good you have your own opinions," Sutton tells them. "But I want you to do the activity based on what the little piece of paper says."
Five of the pieces assert that file-sharing is unequivocally immoral. "Illegal file-swapping has turned my dreams into nightmares," reads the singer's card. "When people illegally download, they are stealing from my family and me," reads the set builder's. The single counterpoint is represented by the computer user. He defends file-sharing largely on the grounds that he won't get caught: "Last time I checked, the Internet police didn't exist."
The activity seems less a role-playing exercise than a regurgitation. Sutton asks each student "why file-swapping's such a big deal." The kids gamely paraphrase from their squares of paper. "The directors don't get paid when the people download movies," says a director. "If only, like, one person is buying the movie and everyone else is copying it, the people in the movies can't, like, make the set things," says a set builder. "It's costing me, like, big bucks because people, like, download them instead of buying them," says a producer. The children, most from the middle-class suburb of Santa Clarita, participate enthusiastically and don't appear troubled, or even bored, by the rote nature of the exercise.
"What's the Diff?" got its start when the MPAA, the trade group representing Hollywood studios, approached Junior Achievement with $100,000 and a notion to get its ideas about the ethics of file-sharing into the classroom. It was written by JA staffers and consultants in close communication with Craig Hoffman, the director of corporate communications at Warner Bros. Entertainment.
The point of the program, says MPAA spokesperson Rich Taylor, is for "students to reach their own conclusions about being a good digital citizen." The real point, of course, is to protect Hollywood from the fate of the record industry. While the music business has already suffered from file-sharing, the film industry has so far been largely unaffected. In fact, according to an Adams Media Research report, Hollywood has seen revenue rise 27 percent in the same four-year period that the recording industry went into free fall. So consider this a preemptive attack, a giant guilt trip on the file-sharing public. Compared to the recording industry's strategy to sue everyone in sight, "What's the Diff?" seems downright enlightened.
Critics aren't mollified. The program presents a "tremendously one-sided view of copyright," says Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "There's no balance; it's entirely corporate driven. If anything, it's an exercise in how efficiently you can brainwash students."
Seltzer might be considerably less concerned had she sat in on a recent lesson at Commerce Middle School in a working-class neighborhood of Yonkers, New York. As in Santa Clarita, the kids here read their stock responses, but unlike their Californian counterparts, they do it in a sullen monotone, as if reciting some musty poem. Only the computer user, an animated wiseass in baggy jeans, delivers a passionate response. "It's not hurting anybody. I'm not selling it. I'm using it in my home." The other kids nod energetically at this, and hands shoot up throughout the room. One boy says, "If the computer user is just downloading music, how are the carpenters who work on movie sets being hurt?" The other students regard this as irrefutable logic, and a chorus of "mm-hmm" and "that's right" fills the room.
A confident, articulate girl in cornrows and too-tight jeans speaks up. "Look, you preview what's on the CD, and if you like it, you go out and buy the CD because you get a booklet and, like, extra stuff with it." This, whether she knows it or not, is exactly the argument that the major music labels are hearing from many of their own consultants.
As the class winds down, several kids say that downloading files from Kazaa is no different than borrowing a library book. "After you get it, you're just going to delete it anyway," a boy says. JA volunteer Evan Snyder, who's good with the kids, gets a crafty look on his face. "How is that different from me just borrowing a Ferrari from the dealership and just passing it around to my friends?"
The girl in the cornrows snaps back, "Well, that's fine! You're borrowing it! As long as you give it back." The bell rings, and the students bustle into the well-worn hallways of their middle school.
Contributing editor Jeff Howe (jeffhowe@wiredmag.com) wrote about social networks in Wired 11.11.
credit Illustration by l-dopa
