To stem the influx of peer-to-peer file-sharing lawsuits cropping up in schools, the American Library Association (ALA) plans to roll out a nationwide curriculum designed to help students navigate the murky waters of copyright law. The program is a direct response to similar campaigns launched by the software and motion picture industries, which have been criticized by some educators for dwelling too much on the penalties of piracy and not enough on students' rights under the law.

Though it's still in the early stages of planning, Rick Weingarten, director of the ALA's office for information technology policy, said the association likely would distribute guides and other materials to school librarians nationwide during the coming school year. This fall, organizers will conduct focus groups with students to get a better sense of how kids interact online.

"To me, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to develop a program if you don't understand how kids communicate," he said. The end result most likely will be a series of comic books designed to teach students the dos and don'ts of internet file sharing and intellectual property law.

The ALA's motives are twofold. First, said Weingarten, the library association felt it had a civic responsibility to build awareness about the issue. "Libraries sit right in the middle, where a lot of people come to access information--much of which is copyrighted," he said.

But Weingarten added there was more to it than that. "Copyright is a very, very complicated issue," he explained--one that students have learned about primarily through materials distributed by anti-piracy groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Recoding Industry Association of America (RIAA), and Business Software Alliance (BSA), all three of which have been criticized for leaning too heavily in favor of corporate interests.

Though the ALA is far from opposed to copyright protection in the digital age, Weingarten said, the association also is highly supportive of provisions in the law that enable the sharing of files and other digital materials for educational and research purposes, or what is known as "fair use."

"In the library community, we recognize that there are a lot of positive aspects to peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies," he said. Instead of focusing on the penalties that await copyright infringers, the ALA plans to provide a "much more balanced approach" to learning about the law.

"The way the content industry would like to present [the issue] is that it's all black-and-white," Weingarten said--though he acknowledged that shedding light on topics such as fair use, among other grayer areas of the law, "is not going to be an easy line to walk."

The ALA chose to go the route of comic books because organizers felt it was something students could relate to, Weingarten said. "We wanted something in a narrative," he explained. "Something kids would understand."