Students Do Not Share Gonzales' View on Piracy

In his first trip to California as the nation's attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales told a group of high school students to just say no to online piracy.

But, for many of the students, the response was to just say "why not?"

During a daylong UCLA seminar featuring Gonzales, students peppered speakers with tough questions about the real effect of piracy. Some even suggested that government should focus more on tackling poverty and improving education than on jailing kids who download movies, music and software.

"Isn't the government using morality as a means for studios to make millions of dollars?" asked 18-year-old senior Kate Schwartz of Santa Monica's New Roads High School.

Unfazed by the students' skepticism, Gonzales said this was only the beginning of an intensive educational outreach effort. He wanted to let the students know that intellectual property theft was illegal, carried consequences and could permanently stain their records.

"Sitting through a one-hour, two-hour session may not be enough.... It takes awhile to educate people," he told reporters later. "And, unfortunately for some people, it will take an example by this department prosecuting people."

Still, Thursday's event proved to be a reality check for Gonzales and Hollywood in how hard it will be to discourage bootlegging by today's tech-savvy kids.

Eamon Cannon, an 18-year-old senior at New Roads, said talking to students as if they were criminals was unlikely to change downloading habits. The son of film and TV actress Robin Bartlett, who has appeared in such shows as "Mad About You," Cannon said he downloaded hip-hop songs from file-sharing networks and didn't plan to stop anytime soon.

"No one's going to relate to it," he said of Gonzales' stern message. "I don't feel I'm doing something wrong."

The seminar, sponsored by Court TV and the Motion Picture Assn. of America, also featured Oscar-nominated actor James Cromwell and stuntman Kurt D. Lott pleading with the students not to download movies and music because it hurts artists financially. They told students that piracy cut into the Screen Actors Guild's health insurance and pension plans. Cromwell, who was in such films as "Babe" and the HBO show "Six Feet Under," is SAG's secretary-treasurer.

Cromwell noted that only a tiny fraction of actors make even $50,000 a year from their craft. Although the system for distributing money in the film industry may be broken, Cromwell said, it does not justify copying movies for free. "There's a downside to piracy, and that is, ultimately, it screws people over," he said.