Earlier this week we saw an online controversy sparked by Warner Brothers' enforcement of its intellectual property rights in material being sold in an auction to benefit charity. The criticism of the Warner action was quite familiar to anyone who has been in my gig for awhile--whatever its legal rights, the reasoning goes, no company should be so heartless as to keep money from going to a good cause.

But when companies are making decisions on IP enforcement, they're not just looking at the occasional impromptu online benefit. They see dozens (if not more) of charitable fundraising efforts using their material each year, and some of them can be quite widespread.

Here's an example: the new "Be the Hero" campaign from the World Wildlife Fund. Among wrestling fans, the WWF is perhaps best known for its draconian enforcement of its own trademark in the notorious lawsuit that forced the World Wrestling Federation to change its name to the WWE. However, in its own marketing the WWF appropriates the uniforms of Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman to depict ordinary people as eco-heroes for turning off the lights and watering after 6 p.m.

The merits of the campaign aside--for me the word "hero" loses any distinct meaning if you become one by turning off your TV--these WWF ads illustrate what has many rights owners concerned: the establishment of charity as a law-free zone.

YOUR LYON EYES EXTRA:

A commenter notes a similar eco-campaign in France that produced an unauthorized DC-Marvel crossover:

Funny we had the same idea here but adapted to a campaign whose goal was to tell people to be "cleaner" citizen in the streets of our city (Lyon, France). We actually also used Superman too but my favorite one was a visual with the picture of hand wide open with the title "The Fantastic Five". The Fantastic Five were actually the five fingers every super citizen has and can use to throw their waste in the trash and not to leave them on the streets...

While this comment is funny 'cuz it's true:

At last, a social and environmental campaign that does not include:

1. Malformed, burned, skeleton children
2. Images which, seen from a distance, remind you of something else
3. Bush

However, now that other companies have used the same strategy to gain dominance in areas where Microsoft had little presence, what can the company do to catch up?

One strategy: get people to feel that downloading Microsoft software is a charitable way to help children.

This online charitable outreach from Microsoft Australia that has folks there buzzing about Microsoft's generous digi-do-goodery. After all, Microsoft offers to give a dollar to charity merely if you watch a video for Microsoft Office, which is not much of a self-serving pitch because you probably already have it!

But look carefully and you'll see a brilliant bit of corporate strategy. In order to watch the video, you have to download Silverlight, Microsoft's attempted Flash-killer. That charitable download adds one more user in Microsoft's bid for market share. As this article indicates, the battle between Adobe and Microsoft is going to be so fierce, and it appears that charity is Microsoft's weapon of choice.

Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child organization admitted defeat in its effort to sell millions of open-source computers in Asia, Africa and Latin America by joining with Microsoft to load Windows XP onto its green and white laptops. The decision marks the end of the effort to spread Constructionist learning pedagogy—learning by doing—to tens of millions of poor children in villages around the world.

The original goal of OLPC was to use open source software to connect children directly to one another and the web so they could learn from one another and directly from many sources of information. Ivan Krstic, the key software architect at OLPC, explains this on his blog. That’s the heart of Seymour Papert's Constructionist theory of education. Open.

The OLPC has consistently been lauded in the US in terms of its design and its technology, not its underlying education pedagogy. But it is the pedagogy that has always been the crux of the experiment and it is the pedagogy, in the end, that proved unacceptable to governments around the world because they felt it insulted and challenged them.

The lesson here is that however brilliant the innovation, it needs to be appropriate to the context and the culture. It needs to fit in and not be imposed. And it needs coalitions, teams, to support it. In fact, in the case of education, which is extremely politically sensitive in every country, OLPC should have developed both the design of the computer and the pedagogy with the Indian and Chinese teachers and administrators, not for them.

With Microsoft's XP software now being loaded, the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop becomes just another inexpensive (the price will be around $200, double the original estimate) machine competing with Intel's Classmate and others. Its one virtue is that it will run all the educational software being produced by educators in Asia, Latin America and Africa.