We are always trying to shine some light to our kids, and teach them about right and wrong. A few things are pretty hard to explain. Copyright for one is a pretty complicated thing.

My daughter has frequently asked me about movies and music. Her friends tell her that they can download any music or movie from the Internet, and she asks me if this is true, and if I’ll teach her to do it. Or our neighbor’s kid keeps asking her why can’t she run on the PlayStation the copied games that he has. And I try to explain to her that we really are not interested in pirated videos and our PlayStation is not “cracked”, so it does not run the pirated games. I try to tell her about this thing called Copyright…

For her, this simple does not make a lot of sense…

But, yesterday, she asked me why she can’t access her video on YouTube, and I found out that she hasn’t been able to access it for some time now. So I went to take a look. And her video was removed because of “copyright claims made by a third party”… Now, go explain that to a 10 year-old kid…

The thing is: some time ago, when she was 8, she wanted to learn how to do a video, so, she made a little video with two string puppets. Recorded with an old digital picture camera, that had enough memory to record about 30s of video at a time. She basically did it all, I was mostly the puppeteer and supporter. Including choosing the song from one of our (paid for) CDs. “Águas de Março”, from Tom Jobim, one of the best songs of all time. At the time, I didn’t have the insight to try to explain to an 8 year-old details of the Copyright laws… The video was a tribute to the song, didn’t use the full song, was a learning tool for an 8 years old girl trying to be creative. It was watched on YouTube a little over 7,000 times in 2 years, a drop on the ocean by any possible count.

Yesterday, she really learned about copyrigh… She learned that this “third party” person asked YouTube to removed her video. Because of a song that she paid to have. She also learned that the fact that she was never allowed to download the free music and videos over the internet didn’t help her at all.

She is pretty upset. She feels cheated. Her first question was why “third party” is after her? She is a kid, and wants revenge. She says she doesn’t want to pay for music or video anymore. I’m telling her about Creative Commons.

Thank you Music Industry. You have — once again — turned a customer into an enemy. Good job. Keep doing this, it works wonders to explain difficult concepts to little kids. It is at least helping me shining light through all the Copyright darkness…

This post is cross-posted to java.net.