The MPAA tries to turn junior high school into antipiracy boot camp. The producer tells her sad story with her fists curled inside the sleeves of an oversize hooded sweatshirt: “I’m, like, losing my job, and maybe I, like, need that money for my family or something.” The cause of her consternation: peer-to-peer file-sharing, which she says is devastating Hollywood. The “producer” doesn’t produce movies any more than the “actor” or “singer” sitting beside her acts or sings. They are all seventh-graders at Sierra Vista Junior High in Southern California’s Santa Clarita Valley. They’re engaged in a role-playing game, as directed in a lesson plan sponsored and bankrolled by the Motion Picture Association of America. The curriculum – called “What’s the Diff?: A Guide to Digital Citizenship” – has reached slightly more than half a million junior high students since it began this school year.
The point of the program, says MPAA spokesperson Rich Taylor, is for “students to reach their own conclusions about being a good digital citizen.” The real point, of course, is to protect Hollywood from the fate of the record industry. While the music business has already suffered from file-sharing, the film industry has so far been largely unaffected. In fact, according to an Adams Media Research report, Hollywood has seen revenue rise 27 percent in the same four-year period that the recording industry went into free fall. So consider this a preemptive attack, a giant guilt trip on the file-sharing public. Compared to the recording industry’s strategy to sue everyone in sight, “What’s the Diff?” seems downright enlightened.
What happened to “What’s the diff?”? I can’t seem to find it online anywhere.