Tech advocacy group Downhill Battle launched two websites today
The first site — www.kidssmellbullshit.com features a contest for kids to write a letter or submit a photo about the issue, which will then be sent to [The Business Software Alliance] and [The Motion Picture Association of America]. The winner will receive an iPod Mini. The second site – www.copyrightcurriculum.com – is a collaborative effort to write a public-interest curriculum for teachers that want to address these issues in their classrooms.
The move was to counter private sector and lobbying groups' partisan educational tools that are being forced into public schools. Teachers across the country who use the Weekly Reader in their classroom have been receiving installments of the BSA curriculum in the magazine since September 1st. In addition, the MPAA has hired Junior Achievement to teach a filesharing curriculum that drastically distorts the legal realities of the history of copyright and peer-to-peer filesharing. Kidssmellbullshit.com hosts a letter-writing and mash-up photo contest for school-aged children with the goal of sending a youth-based message to BSA and MPAA about the their thoughts on these new technologies. Other users are allowed to collaboratively edit, filter and mash-up the curriculum materials using the collaborative wiki system.
The second is a slightly more serious page called the Collaborative Copyright and Technology Law Curriculum . This one's for the grownups in the house who want to do some serious ass-whooping.
