Copyright, It’s Not For Kids

Yes a percentage of kids steal stuff.

From a packet of gum when they are 10 to music, movies and television content when they hit elementary school (yes it starts this early).  I’m looking at my five year old son right now and I’m pretty sure he is watching a youtube video on how to open a torrent file; that or a video of sharks.

I attended the Copyright and Technology conference on Thursday.  The conference featured a combination of lawyers and technical leads focused on copyright protection for companies including Viacom, Sony, Time Warner, Comcast, Adobe and others.  Discussion topics included content piracy, identification and copyright trends.

Media companies know they have a problem, and in fact they always have had it, the visibility and speed of the problem is obviously amplified due to the ease of access via technologies enabled by the Internet.

The statement and subsequent support from others that bothered me a bit is that a few media companies are in effect almost excepting 18-24 year old pirates in order to focus on swashbucklers and wenches (just wanted to say wenches) 24 years or older noting they have disposable income.