Moses, media piracy and the MPAA

If only people understood why they shouldn’t do it, then they wouldn’t do it.

That was the message of the ” target=”_hplink”>report, published by the authoritative Social Science Research Council, came out just a couple of weeks before Chris Dodd’s speech.  “Does Education Work?” is the title of one of its sections.  Here’s the answer:

“We see no evidence that this knowledge [that file sharing of copyrighted material is piracy] will have any impact on practices.  We see no real ‘education’ of the consumer to be done…. Efforts to stigmatize piracy have failed…. Although education is generally presented as a long-term investment in counteracting these attitudes, the lack of evidence for their effectiveness is striking.”

Not only is there no evidence that education has been building a stronger “culture of intellectual property.”  There’s also little evidence that enforcement works.  Splashy raids haven’t reduced piracy.  Two weeks ago the judge in a lawsuit by13 record companies against LimeWire called their demand for