Education Ministry Exploited For Private Interests

Source: http://p2pnet.net/story/11908

The MPAA’s Singapore lie

p2pnet.net news:- In a new ‘educational’ material flooding Singapore schools, Hollywood’s MPA has been caught out in one of the most blatant propaganda lies yet seen.

Anti-p2p leaflets from Hollywood MPAA clone the MPA (Motion Picture Association) are being fronted by something called the HIP Honour IP alliance.

Through it, Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney are inundating all 164 of the country’s secondary schools and 16 junior college students with an indoctrination booklet written and published by the MPA, “outlining the dangers of illegal peer-to-peer file sharing”.
Any dangers, such as they may be, come wholly and solely from the MPA and similar entertainment cartel-owned units.
The country’s 23 National Library branches will also be receiving ‘Illegal File-Sharing: The Risks Aren’t Worth It’ and backing the studios up is the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore.
Schools staffs, paid from school fees and local taxes, will be expected to disseminate the corporate squibs and MPA representatives will be readily available to ‘help’ teachers ‘educate’ students.

The front cover (right) shows a frightened girl chewing her fingernails as she peers at some unidentified horror on her laptop screen.
Says the booklet, “pirates frequently make ’spoofs’ of titles available on peer-to-peer networks, so what you think you are downloading might in fact be a fake”.

But, this is one of the most blatant examples of an out-front corporate lie ever. Because what’s ‘fake’ is the statement itself.
By far the vast majority of, if not all, spoofs come from cartel-hired online bounty hunters such as the Mediasentry, whose ‘evidence’ of file sharing has been repeatedly discredited, or from the likes of the Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG music cartel, who admit, “inserting promotional material into the decoy files, and then planting those files prominently on file-sharing sites”.

The idea is either:

• People download a ’spoof’ file mistakenly thinking it’s the real thing and one or other of the enforcement organisations hopes to later use any associated IP address to produce a subpoena; or
• The Big 4 and other marketeers can then, “turn what is now an anti-piracy tool into an advertising medium“.

Stay tuned