MIT is a big pirate—blame it on the kids who love Scratch…
Is MIT’s website the biggest lair of online pirates? The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), which represents UK music industry professionals, is particularly annoyed these past weeks with the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sending tens of thousands of requests to delete content, due to copyright infringements, reports Torrent Freak.
The culprit is none other than the educational platform Scratch, where kids aged 8 to 16 learn the basics of computer programming by creating games and other interactive stories, before joyfully sharing them. These same kids, who are certainly creative—more than 12 million projects have been shared on the platform since 2007—but significantly less informed about copyright law, are massively publishing their creations using background music.
MIT has not published details of the takedown notices. Google claims to have received more than 40,000 alerts regarding “scratch.mit.edu” URLs, writes Torrent Freak, which “makes the MIT website one of the top pirate sites on the Internet, and definitely the most infringing educational domain”.