Turning kids into ‘pirates’?

That’s one of the concerns of Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig – that “this age of [copyright] prohibition” may be turning kids into “pirates,” the BBC reports. Lessig – also founder of the Creative Commons, a system of copyright licensing that allows creators to share and protect their work with allowances for non-commercial use – is seeking a balance between “the rights of the artist and the creativity of Web users for re-using material,” he said in a talk at the Hay Festival in Wales. I think, in other words, he doesn’t want all the conventional-media fears of copyright theft and the digital-rights management and litigation associated with them to shut down all the creative thinking going into “mashups” (see “The age of remixes, mashups”). Lessig said “a war is being fought with law and technology to eliminate piracy, likened to using ‘DDT to kill a gnat’,” according to the BBC. Meanwhile, the UK-based IFPI (umbrella for recording industry associations around the world), said it may sue users of Moscow-based music retailer AllofMP3.com, Computeractive.co.uk reports, adding that AllofMP3.com is the UK’s No. 2 music-sales site (after iTunes), representing 44% of that market. All of MP3.com sells digital tunes at steep discounts and says it’s all legal. And in other anti-piracy news, “more than 50 Swedish law enforcement officials raided 10 locations” associated with ThePirateBay.org, a site “accused of directing users to pirated films, music and software,” the BBC reports. The site described itself as the largest BitTorrent (file-sharing technology) search index.