Hong Kong Using Children to Hunt for Piracy

westcoaster004 writes to tell us that according to The New York Times the Hong Kong government will be using some 200,000 youths to scour the internet for piracy. Members of the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and nine other youth organizations will be drawn from with the first 1,600 being "sworn in" this Wednesday. From the article: "Tam Yiu-keung, the Hong Kong Excise and Customs Department's senior superintendent of customs for intellectual property investigations, said the program should not raise any concerns about privacy or the role of children in law enforcement. The youths will be visiting Internet discussion sites that are open to all, so the government program is no different than asking young people to tell the police if they see a crime while walking down the street, he said."

Its not that hard

[GmAz]

Why do they think its so difficult. Go to google.com and search for Warez.

Save the pirates!

[StikyPad]

In my day, we used Pirates to hunt for children.

Yarrr!

like 1940's vice squads

[smellsofbikes]

Sending oodles of kids out looking for music-sharing sites is kind of like sending angry, unattractive, middle-aged cops to "stop" prostitution. I imagine these kids sticking USB thumbdrives in their cop computers and bookmarking wildly for the evening's Internet Cafe feeding frenzy.

Oboy!

[ackthpt]

Anti-Piracy Merit Badges!

To earn one you must:

• Identify a pirated song
• Identify a pirated video or film
• Turn in a friend or family member
• Be able to recite from memory the RIAA & MPAA oaths of Allegiance to Lucre

Breaking news: Chairman Moa is doing 3,500 RPM in his grave.

Re:Bad idea

[pilgrim23]

In a first coup for the Hong Kong police, the kids found 1000 copies of pirated Microsoft Offce and dutifully reported the discovery. The culprits in question turn out to be....the Hong Kong Police...

I can see it now...

[RyoShin]

Hong Kong: Aha! You people are pirating software and video games!
Pirates: Aha! You are using child labor!
Joe Everyday: Oh no, who should I hate more?
RIAA/MPAA: The pirates, they're the worst kind of criminal!
American Government: Think of the children!
Joe Everyday: [glares] Not helping!

And then Canada just kind of laughs and goes back to whatever its doing.

Nothing can go wrong!

[Gurp]

Ok, so we're going to:

1) Force children, who no doubt understand teh intarwebs better than those in charge of this, to swear that they will search out piracy
2) Encourage said children and young adults to spend time searching for movies and warez
3) Wait for the reports to roll in.

Whoever thought this up is brilliant. This plan has no flaws. Why didn't my government think of this?

Boy/Girl scouts report.....

[Roskolnikov]

a surge in enrollments, it would seem that the warez-hunters have found a sanctioned way to collect britney speers albums.

That's nothing

[SuperKendall]

Here in America, we have millions of youths scouring the internet for piracy!

However, we do outsource the collecton results in Sweden so I guess we can't take all the credit.

Re:Nothing can go wrong!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I am a rich republican. We hold semi-annual stockholder's meetings. You are not invited.

Re:Really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who spends ten minutes actually looking should be able to find enough to choke a hard drive. Go look in USENET groups, Google for it, get into chatrooms and ask 'Where can I get a copy of X' or even just look on eBay. Piracy and Knock-offs are rampant on there, despite their lame attempts to curtail it.

Shhhh!

this merit badge has a problem

[circletimessquare]

the merit batch comes with an E.U.L.A. that makes it measure as a 3' circle

hard to stich that on your average girl scout/ boy scout uniform

additionally, due to D.M.C.A. rules, each boyscout/ girlscout must get preapproval from 5 separate companies and 6 layers of lawyers before they are able to legally wear the merit badge

and finally, anyone viewing the merit badge on the person of a boyscout/ girlscout must gain preapproval from the same companies/ lawyers or they are in violation of fair use of the merit badge

i mean come on folks, content creators have rights here! think of the starving merit badge stichers!

Boy Scouts?

[k4_pacific]

Redmond WA (Hydraulic Press) - The Business Software Alliance announced today a settlement agreement in their long running trademark dispute with the Boy Scouts of America. According to the terms of the agreement, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) must use its swelling ranks to help the Business Software Alliance (BSA) sniff out piracy on the internet. Another controversial term of the settlement is the mandate that requirements for the Computing merit badge must be completed using only legitimately purchased Microsoft branded software.

The dispute started in 1998, when the Business Software Alliance noticed that the Boy Scouts of America, a quasi-military organization headquartered in Irving, Texas, had the same three letter initials as them. They promptly sued for damages and infringement. While many legal scholars believed that the Scouts would prevail as they have existed for nearly a century, the Business Software Alliance won the case by throwing wave after wave of lawyers at them until the Scouts relented.

"I cannot continue to sit back and allow the Boy Scouts to continue to sap and impurify all of our precious intellectual property," said a Business Software Alliance representative, "God willing, we will prevail, through the purity and essence of our trademarks and copyrights."

Bob Talbee, a scoutmaster in Grand Rapids, Michigan, stated that he would cancel the weekend campout to comply with the order, "Sorry kids, we've got to spend the weekend on the internet looking for something or someone called warez," he announced at a recent Scout meeting. Talbee, a bricklayer by trade, was not sure what a warez is, but thought it sounded thoroughly unwholesome and worthwhile for the scouts to work towards eliminating.

Children fighting pirates?

[zerblat]

So, basically, what we have here is children [wikipedia.org] fighting pirates [wikipedia.org] on an island [wikipedia.org]? Where have I heard that before?

A new merit badge

[winkydink]

The Rat Fink

Re:Save the pirates!

[_Sprocket_]

Arrr matey! That be a thought crime, fer sure!

Breaking news!!

[S.P.B.Wylie]

This just in: Hitler has risen from the grave and is suing China for violation of his intellectual property rights.

Re:Search != Stumble Upon

[Foobar of Borg]

Well, I like coffee. Wait a minute, Hitler liked coffee! Oh no, I'm a Nazi and I didn't even realize it! Aaaahhh!!!

Re:Search != Stumble Upon

[ultranova]

Either communist or facist, either way it is a recipe for disaster. Remember the Hitler Youth, they were instructed to do similar actions with rating out people who didn't agree with the Third Reich

Yeah, and let's not forget the East Germany snitch network [wikipedia.org].

It's funny how copyright enforcement seems to create more and more such parallels, isn't it ? Kinda makes me wonder if we don't regard the Copyright Lobby in 50 years the same way we regard Nazi Party now.

Yeah, copyright Nazi. Nazi copyright. Copyright mass murder Hitler Stalin terrorism evil RIAA MPAA DMCA DRM. Eat it up, googlebot :).