By Jennifer Trak
Downloading music from the internet has become second nature for most people. But now you can't swing a cat on the web anymore without hitting issues of copyright law and copyright infringement. In Hong Kong this summer, it would be wise to keep a close eye on any young nephews, nieces, grandchildren, cousins or even (gasp!) your own children before you click to download illegal copies of copyrighted songs and movies.
The Hong Kong government is implementing a new program called the Youth Ambassadors Campaign, that will have 200,000 youths searching Internet discussion sites for illegal downloads in order to report the offenders to the authorities. This coalition of underaged enforcers will include Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and nine other uniformed youth groups, aged from as young as 9 to 25. Is it just me or is the promotion of a "spy" culture among a nation's youth seem vaguely unsettling?
Advocates of civil liberties, like the policy research group Civic Exchange, are suspicious of the government's motives and have likened this program to the Cultural Revolution in mainland China which encouraged children to spy on relatives to provide the government with information. Despite the enthusiasm of the Hong Kong government in having their own army of underage informers, other countries such as the US have said that they have no plans to follow suit.
In other internet-related copyright news, the British government is heedlessly crushing democratic rights by putting a gag order on Craig Murray's book Murder in Samarkand, not because of any real sense of copyright infringement, but because they want to prevent government secrets that may incriminate them from leaking out to the general public. A film version of this book is scheduled to be released in 2008, which I'm assuming will not be downloaded by anyone in Hong Kong of legal age...
Elsewhere: Opendemocracy's Becky Hogge rages against the Crown's copyright.
