Earlier this month at the IP enforcement summit UK Music CEO Jo Dipple urged rights holders to do more to educate young people about copyright.
However often those young people, whether they be listening to music or reading a magazine online, are not all that keen to learn about a complex and hard to access subject.
Which is why we thought UK Music’s solution is brilliant. They developed a mobile app and game ‘Music Inc’ which aims to both entertain young people and educate them about copyright and licensing within the music industry. Launched jointly with the Government it helps explain the real effect piracy has on artists. It has already been downloaded by 100,000 users – well beyond the normal audience of copyright enthusiasts!
Magazine and newspaper publishers often face similar difficulties in articulating the impact of piracy to an audience unaware frameworks are there to protect creators. The internet has made it so easy to wholesale lift and copy content with little thought to the painstaking research, experience and effort brought to bear by the journalist who write it.
So hats off to Jo and UK Music for managing to illustrate this difficult issue in a visually engaging way. We hope it has the intended effect.