shouting loudly

New Boy Scout merit badge: “Respect Copyrights”

MPAA chief Dan Glickman is proudly trumpeting his newest accomplishment: working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles to create a new merit badge in respecting copyright.

“Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft,” Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday.

Incidentally, this isn’t the first Boy Scouts to deploy such a badge. It happened this May in Hong Kong, and again, it was at the urging of the studios.

Since the MPAA developed the curriculum, I doubt the lessons include a robust respect for fair use rights. It’s probably more akin to the factually inaccurate claim heard at the end of professional baseball games:

Any rebroadcast, reproduction, retransmission or other use of the pictures and accounts of this game without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is strictly prohibited.

If you don’t think they take this seriously, read this permission slip (pdf; link from StayFree).

Let’s hear it for merit badges in relinquishing our own free speech rights. Yay!

(Link from fellow ASC student, Cabral Bigman)