Intellectual property education is the teaching of explanations of and arguments concerning intellectual property laws, especially copyright and related violations. Proponents argue that such education should be implemented because of increasing copyright infringement by students (and the general population). Detractors argue that such education is tantamount to forced indoctrination of propaganda.

History and reasoning

For most of its history, copyright was only an issue for publishers and authors, because other people did not have the technology to allow them to easily make copies of works. But in modern times, with the development of photocopiers, tape recorders, and nearly everything done with computers, the ability to copy and publish works is much more widely availably, and much of this activity is covered by copyright law.

The incremental cost of making a new copy of an electronic file is very low, because making electronic copies of information costs little. This ease of making copyright infringing copies has led to increasing infringement of copyright laws by the general public. In order to curb this infringement copyright holders have lobbied to pass more and more restrictive laws.

One school of thought, advocated by commentators including Richard Stallman and Jessica Litman, holds that if the expectations and habits of the public conflict with copyright, it is copyright which must adjust.

Many advocates of existing copyright laws reach the opposite conclusion: digital technology means that all citizens must now learn to understand and respect copyright as it stands. In particular, while it may be in an individual's self-interest to infringe copyright and obtain something without paying for it, it can be argued that society as a whole would lose out because less copyrighted works would be produced. Since the rules of copyright often run contrary to users' individual self-interest, a great deal of education may be required to prevent violation of these laws.

In the United States, intellectual property education was strongly advocated in 1995 by USPTO head Bruce Lehman's Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights for the Information Infrastructure Task Force. As they put it, children must learn to "just say yes" to licensing. Since then, calls for copyright education in schools have been ongoing. Two developments in 2003 have been the introduction of legislative proposal HR-2517 in the U.S. House of Representatives by Howard Berman, entitled the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2003; and the launch, by the MPAA, of an IPE campaign in American schools

from : en.wikipedia.org