I’m incredibly skeptical of the project of teaching kids about copyright and fair use – not because it’s unimportant, because it’s so dire.
But copyright was developed as an industrial doctrine to regulate the entertainment industry. If kids need to understand industrial regulation in order to do their homework or horse around with their friends, something’s desperately wrong. You can’t write a regulation that’s complex enough to help Warner license Harry Potter to the Universal theme parks and still make it simple enough to cover children writing Harry Potter fanfic.
If it was simple enough for them, it wouldn’t matter, because no one at Warners wants to write a contract for a schoolchild.
But California, in its infinite absurdity, has passed a rule requiring schools to teach copyright – thanks to intense lobbying from the film industry – and almost all the education kids get amounts to “abstinence only,” as in, “Whatever you’re doing, it’s probably illegal, so don’t bother trying.” Various entities, including EFF, have developed better curricula than that, but the bottom line is, if you have to understand obscure industrial rules in order to conduct routine activities, the rules are stupid and at best you’ll be helping kids get in slightly less trouble and/or feel slightly less hopeless.
Consumerist’s Mary Beth Quirk has an excellent piece surveying the copyright curriculum landscape, and the people doing the heroic, nearly impossible work of providing a nuanced view of copyright to schoolkids.
