MPAA wants parents, teachers to rat on kids

Found on The Register on Tuesday, 16 November 2004
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Conservatives often accuse Hollywood of failing to pay heed to 'family values', but the Motion Picture Ass. of America's latest initiative is designed to split families right down the middle. The MPAA hopes that new software will encourage parents to turn their children over to the authorities as file-sharing felons.

The software, designed to identify potentially infringing material on the home PC, is part of the MPAA's war on file sharing and will be released for free by the MPAA at a later date. As expected, the MPAA filed its first John Doe suits against file sharers today.

But by hoping that anxious parents will install the software themselves, thus giving consent, the MPAA can get round its most pressing problem: that it doesn't really know who the infringers are. In every home, the MPAA hopes, is an informer: an anxious parent.

This is a pretty well known approach to catch subversive elements under a fascist regime. Does the movie industry really think it can find a lot of sharers this way? Even more interesting: if the kids are too young to be sued, doesn't this mean that their parents (who reported them) get sued instead?