Understanding Digital Piracy (Digital and Information Literacy, 3)

With the rise of the Internet and the explosion of Web-based entertainment, digital piracy has become a startlingly common crime and a huge problem that robs companies, artists, and other content creators of their creative and financial due. The fundamentally unfair nature of the crime and the harsh consequences of this illegal behavior need to be brought home to teens in a very visceral, high-impact way. By framing the discussion as property theft pure and simple and putting a human face on the victims, who are the very people teens respect and idolize–musicians, actors, directors, authors, gamers, programmers–this text does exactly that. Steeped as it is in digital literacy, suitable as a source for research projects, and serving up an argument whose structure, development, and effectiveness can be analyzed by readers, this is an excellent example of an informational text that conforms to many of the reading standards of the Common Core Curriculum.