When not producing reports about the state of software piracy in China, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) produces reports about the state of software piracy among children. Their newest report is interesting because it claims that children (ages 8 to 18) are now downloading significantly less music, movies, and software than they were only two years ago.

The study shows that 57 percent of all respondents said that they have never downloaded media from the Internet without paying for it, up from 40 percent in 2004. In every area that the study examined, there has been a sharp drop in the last two years. Gaming downloads among children declined from 32 percent to 25 percent, movie downloads fell from 17 percent to 10 percent, and music downloads plummeted significantly, from 53 percent in 2004 to 32 percent today.

This sounds like great news all around for content creators, but there's a fairly big hitch: downloading increases with age. While most eight-year-olds don't download music, for instance (only nine percent do so), most 18-year-olds do (52 percent). The same trend can be seen in most categories, leading the BSA to argue that "as kids grow older, they begin to view cyberspace as a virtual 'wild, wild West'."

As with many BSA statistics, it's not clear that these are truly representative of the total situation. A recent report from research firm Big Champagne, for instance, found that P2P usage has doubled in the last two years, not declined. As even the BSA admits, as kids grow older, they download much more material. To argue that these statistics signal a "winning of the war" is a pretty tenuous claim, but it does provide some evidence that attitudes among the children are shifting.

The report's fact sheet also shows that most kids care only about consequences, not whether their actions are right or wrong. The greatest worry among those who download software and media is not guilt or getting in trouble with parents, but contracting a virus or spyware. About 40 percent of kids, in fact, don't believe that downloading such material is "always wrong." (Intriguingly, 16 percent of these same kids also don't believe that plagiarizing text from Internet sources without credit is always wrong, which goes a long way toward explaining the rise in Internet plagiarism.)

So how is the BSA going to counter such attitudes among children? It is—seriously—going to employ a small weasel (insert your own joke here).

"BSA also today launched a new website, www.cybertreehouse.com, designed exclusively for young people to learn about appropriate computer usage in a fun and informative way. The site includes Garret the Ferret, BSA?s cyber-champion mascot, leading kids through games and activities that illustrate smart cyber behavior."

If you'd like to see what your kids might be receiving, you can check out Garret's copyright adventures in this brief comic that shows kids just how "uncool" copyright violations are. By the way, if you didn't know that corporations could pay to get their message out to kids without going through you first, note that this comic was distributed as a "sponsored supplement" to Weekly Reader that your child may well have received at school.