Warning Kids About Internet Dangers

Television’s Gilligan’s Island Happy Days and Bewitched have been replaced by the Internet’s MySpace YouTube and Facebook as young Texans’ favorite way to spend their spare time.

Unfortunately social networking Web sites such as MySpace provide students with access to more than the antics of a shipwrecked crew or a soda shop full of teenagers.  Video Web sites where users may view and share video clips with their friends and family also give online predators access to the same information that a girl is sending to her best friend.

The Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported more than 2600 incidents involving predators contacting children through the Internet.  Some of these cases led to the kidnapping and murder of children.

While parents are certainly the first line of defense against online predators children themselves must be made aware of the dangers involved in logging onto social networking Web sites and/or blogging in Cyberspace.

To that end I voted for Senate Bill 136 by Senator Jane Nelson.  This bill which has passed the Legislature and has been sent to the Governor directs the Texas School Safety Center to develop an Internet safety curriculum in cooperation with the Office of the Attorney General and to make that curriculum available to local schools.

Many schools are already educating students about the dangers of certain Web sites; however Texas’ public schools do not have a cohesive approach to the problem nor do they have the personnel to research and prepare a program from currently available information.

While Senator Nelson’s bill helps protect Internet users from predators a bill that I authored in the Senate and its companion that I sponsored in the House of Representatives will help protect young Texans from themselves.

Senate Bill 1420 and its identical companion bill House Bill 3171 by Representative David Swinford require the Texas Education Agency to make available a curriculum that would include information not only about the potential dangers of posting personal information on the Internet but would also include the consequences of cyber-plagiarism and theft by Internet users.

Texas public school students must be educated on the significance of copyright law as it pertains not only to the printed word but also to audiovisual works including motion pictures software and music recordings.

The illegal filesharing of copyrighted material via the Internet is costing the United States entertainment industry billions of dollars each year resulting in loss of jobs loss of royalties to artists and loss of sales tax revenue to local government.

Young people between the ages of 18 and 24 are the dominant abusers of copyright law; however the majority of college students apprehended for theft under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act did not know their actions were illegal.

House Bill 3171 which passed the Legislature and has been sent to the Governor will  provide information to students in public schools about copyright laws protecting both the industry from theft and the students from unwittingly committing theft.