Primary school children need to learn about intellectual property
The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has launched a raft of teaching resources and videos aimed at helping children aged seven to 11 learn about piracy, patents and trademarks. Catherine Davies, head of the IPO’S education outreach department, said that children start using technology and social media at an increasingly young age, so by the time they are teenagers it is already too late to teach them about respecting copyright laws, telegraph.co.uk wrote.
“We have done a lot of work with teenagers and we have found by that point, they might have already picked up bad habits of picking things up from illegal sources,” she told The Sunday Telegraph.
“That is one of the reasons we have gone to the younger children.”
She said that teaching primary school children about copyright is important ‘preparatory’ work, and ‘plants the seed’ for when they come across concepts of copyright and piracy later on.
It is already too late to try teaching teenagers about copyright, said Catherine Davies, head of the IPO’S education outreach department
The IPO, which is an executive agency of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, is leading the UK government’s efforts to crack down on Internet piracy and protect the revenues of Britain’s creative industries.
A report published last year by the IPO found that the rise of quick and easy illegal streaming services has scuppered declines in Internet piracy.
Since 2013, piracy has fallen from a high of 30 percent of Internet users, a drop that has been credited to the rise of convenient streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify replacing illegal downloads.
But illegal channels have sought to replicate their success by offering on-demand streaming access instead of downloads.
The IPO — formerly known as the Patent Office — already produces teaching materials for General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) students, but this is the first time it has branched out into materials aimed at primary school children.
This is not the first time that the government has attempted to explain complex issues to children.
In 2016, HM Revenue and Customs produced a Junior Tax Facts video for eight- to 11-year-olds, which explained, among other things, that the VAT on sweets meant they were taxpayers too.