Microsoft “Teaching” Kids Intellectual Property Rights With MyBytes

Really, “indoctrinating” kids against correct copyright practices and fair use before the details have even been hammered out in the courts is a better description of this seemingly innocuous little site than “teaching”, in my opinion. The computer giant has created a site called MyBytes, aimed at kids and teens, whose sole purpose is to give them “real experience” of how P2P file sharing can affect a musician and “educate” them on file sharing laws in the way Microsoft sees fit.

One of the main flaws in this logic is assuming that musicians are paid fairly and correctly in the first place. As it stands now, a musician on a major label has to sell an exorbitant number of CDs and mp3 downloads to see any return on their tremendous efforts, while corporate music fat cats see return immediately. This is similar in pay structure to the RIAA keeping the bulk of the money from each lawsuit win and the labels keeping the paltry remainder and not sharing it with the artists they purport to “help”.

The second major flaw is that Microsoft, last time I checked, was a software company, not a law firm. I have inherent problems with anyone indoctrinating bad law into the heads of children before it has even been sorted out by the real lawyers and courts. Yes, the 10 - 16 year old set does often think music downloads are legal. That's because they grasp technology and all that it can do. They go for what is easiest and what makes most sense. Instead of capitalizing on that and making money, companies like Microsoft and the RIAA are trying to beat it out of them so that their corporate world view doesn't have to change.

Yes, I agree that not paying artists for music is wrong. That means that the record labels are just as guilty as the P2P consumer of robbing artists of royalties and percentages. I do not agree that file sharing is always wrong, however; I think there is much too much gray area that has yet to be defined in online music for any company to claim to know what is “right” or legal at this point. Until we hammer out fair use and how to best make it easy to get the music you want online for one fair, low price, this “MyBytes” web site is as useless as it is clunky and insulting.

If you visit the site you see what looks like an old man talking down to “the whippersnappers” even as he tries to come off “cool” and “hip”. Kids are more intelligent than we give them credit for, and they will see through this thin veneer right to the heart of the attempted manipulation, I'm sure. The site has the kid make short, 20 second songs which other kids are then given the option to buy. The buyers are allowed to choose whether or not to pay.

I think this is supposed to ram home the lesson of how much it “hurts” to have your song go unpaid for. Instead the lesson I think kids will come away with is that music has to be good to earn money. That doesn't necessarily help Microsoft's cause. The site covers all the heavy handed bases, however. For the kids who didn't get the “lesson” hammered home by the create and sell feature, there are plenty of staged interviews and heavily slanted articles to look at supporting Microsoft's viewpoint.

All in all its a strange site that comes across as more of a lecture than an experience, teaches little and looks terrible. I know Microsoft is not known for its sleek design, but come on - they could have put more effort into their “cause” than this. This looks like someone hacked it together in a day and slapped it online, calling it “done”. Microsoft has totally missed the mark (all of the marks) with this cludgy, heavy handed site. I expect the only kids who will use it are the kid of Microsoft employees because their parents say they have to so “mommy [daddy] doesn't get fired”.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                Edited 2/22/08 to fix a broken link