Given that one of the core principles the hacker culture was founded upon is "knowledge should be free", I think setting such an example is clearly in the spirit of encouraging such a culture.

Unfortunately the average kid is likely not going to discover such things on the Internet, and even those who pirate tend to be more interested in far less educational content... I think it's somewhat sad that, despite the various file-sharing/peer-to-peer systems that have appeared making it easier than ever to share lots of content, and build something akin to a massive distributed library, the majority just use them for entertainment.