Doesn't the title of this post sound odd? I mean, if it's a natural inclination for a child to tinker, and in the process learn something new, why is this so bad?

A recent post by Joe Wilcox on his Microsoft Monitor Weblog made me stop and scratch my head at what we are calling bad behavior. In his post Sleepover Sunday Joe tells an engaging tale of the good time his daughter and some friends had playing with his computer during a slumber party. It seems the girls took images from Nintendo's website and pulled them into a photo editing program. They were having a blast changing the images (the digital equivalent to drawing moustaches on pictures in a magazine). Clearly harmless fun but in the end Joe says:
Just a couple of weeks ago my wife and I attended parent/teacher conferences at our local school. A similar copyright infringement activity was taking place. Apparently, the kids were reading the book My Teacher for President. As a follow-up activity to the book several classes were also creating posters advocating their particular teacher for president. It was funny to see how the kids portrayed the teachers (and I'm sure the teachers had the biggest laughs).

But, do you think anyone told the school about the "risks of snatching copyrighted characters" from the book. It was obvious to me that these posters were violating the publishers intellectual property rights by creating a deriviative work. Perhaps the school received permission but in most of these harmless situations they don't.

This is a theme in Lawrence Lessig's Free-Culture book. In chapter 2, "Mere Copyists" Lessig says:

Yet the freedom to tinker with these objects is not guaranteed. Indeed, as we'll see through the course of this book, that freedom is increasingly highly contested. While there's no doubt that your father had the right to tinker with the car engine, there's great doubt that your child will have the right to tinker with the images she finds all around. The law and, increasingly, technology interfere with a freedom that technology, and curiosity, would otherwise ensure.

These restrictions have become the focus of researchers and scholars. Professor Ed Felten of Princeton (whom we'll see more of in chapter 10) has developed a powerful argument in favor of the “right to tinker” as it applies to computer science and to knowledge in general. [22] But Brown's concern is earlier, or younger, or more fundamental. It is about the learning that kids can do, or can't do, because of the law.

“This is where education in the twenty-first century is going,” Brown explains. We need to “understand how kids who grow up digital think and want to learn.”

“Yet,” as Brown continued, and as the balance of this book will evince, “we are building a legal system that completely suppresses the natural tendencies of today's digital kids. ... We're building an architecture that unleashes 60 percent of the brain [and] a legal system that closes down that part of the brain.”

We're building a technology that takes the magic of Kodak, mixes moving images and sound, and adds a space for commentary and an opportunity to spread that creativity everywhere. But we're building the law to close down that technology.

“No way to run a culture,” as Brewster Kahle, whom we'll meet in chapter 9, quipped to me in a rare moment of despondence.

What a culture indeed when we turn a ten year old girls' natural curiosity into a crime.