Singaporean Youths Lack Cyber Awareness

Singaporean youths still lack cyber awareness- this was the conclusion drawn from recent studies by the social work organisation, Fei Yue Community Services. Some extreme cases say they are unable to control how much time they spend online and that life without the internet would be meaningless.
Many teenagers have a vague idea of what copyright laws are for, but they are not clear on these points and think that a lot of their downloads off the internet are perfectly lawful, when they are actually not. A lot of these teenagers are blissfully ignorant of their own ignorance, and believe they are actually internet-savvy teenagers who know what they’re doing, when they are actually unknowingly committing internet crimes all the time. That would be bad enough, but to make matters worse, there is a not insignificant group of teenagers that are fully aware of the crimes they are committing, but yet commit them anyway.
These crimes I speak of are mostly downloading media files such as movies, music files or animated films, or anime, off the internet either through direct downloading or using peer-to-peer networks online. These teenagers happily commit these crimes for a few reasons, it does not seem like it hurts anyone, all their friends are doing it and under what they believe to be the safe anonymity of the internet, they will never be caught.
Under closer inspection, none of these reasons hold water.
As all copyright protection campaigns will tell the sometimes-deaf teenagers, downloading files illegally off the internet amounts to stealing revenue from the creators of the files and destroying their livelihood, possibly disallowing them from making any more of these files as they will only make a loss. The reason ‘all my friends are doing it’ is illogical and does not support the committing of crimes whatsoever, and is simply a convenient excuse to attempt to shift blame from the teenager. The misconception that they cannot be caught can be dispelled easily by reading the newspaper often, to read the occasional story about police and recording companies cracking down on people who made illegal downloads.
Most of these teenagers are not stupid, and subconsciously, they know what they are doing is wrong. Why do they go on doing it? As a teenager myself, I believe that the main reason for this is the teenage curse of not wishing to accept the consequences of what they do and to ignore rules or guidelines that inconvenience them if it appears they will get away with it. After all, reading about people being caught in the newspaper is just something that happened to someone else, and it seems so unlikely that it will ever happen to you.

http://digital.asiaone.com.sg/news/20070206_002.html