I'm prepared to admit that I'm not the most objective person to comment on this story. I distrust corporations. I download mp3s. I spin elaborate justifications involving copyright extension, artificially induced market scarcity, and utopian internet bullshit. So my reaction to this might be a little more knee-jerk than is warranted.

But does it rub anyone else the wrong way that the movie industry is being allowed into elementary school classrooms in order to train a generation of kids to be more reliable revenue streams? This has got to top even DARE in terms of uselessness and deliberate lying. They have a robot named "Safety Bot" to help teach kids that downloading songs will destroy their computers! Fantastic.

It's tough to conclude a trend from three data points, but between this, the resurgence of the Intelligent Design debate and the recent dust-up over abstinence-only education, it sure feels like we're spending more educational resources than we ought to indoctrinating children to conform with the normative standards of narrow, self-interested constituencies. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but it seems like we'd better figure it out before the SAT includes an essay question about comparing and contrasting brand-name colas.