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June 17, 2009, 02:31 PM ET
MIT Tops List of College Copyright Violators
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had the most instances of digital piracy and other copyright infringements among American colleges and universities in 2008 for the second year in a row, according to a report released by Bay-TSP, a California company that offers tracking applications for copyrighted works.
According to the company’s annual report, MIT had 2,593 infringements of media owned by Bay-TSP’s clients. The University of Washington and Boston University ranked second and third, with 1,888 and 1,408 infringements, respectively.
Clients of the company, whose name means “Bay-Area Track, Security, Protect,” include motion-picture studios; software, video-game and publishing companies; and sports and pay-per-view television networks.
The annual report provides an analysis of data collected using piracy-network crawling software. The company does not track all instances of Internet-based piracy, said Jim E. Graham, a Bay-TSP spokesman. It only monitors violations of movies, videos, TV shows, or software that clients ask the company to follow.
Mr. Graham also said not all violations result in a take-down notice. Clients give the company varying instructions for their data, ranging from sending take-down notices to simply tracking how often and by whom the material is infringed.
Although MIT ranks first among domestic colleges and universities, it is not in the top 10 worldwide. The University of Botswana had 9,027 infringements, followed by Sweden’s Uppsala University, which had 8,032 infringements, according to the report.
Jeffrey I. Schiller, the information-services and technology-network manager at MIT, said he has not seen a copy of Bay-TSP’s report, but the institution does not tolerate copyright infringement, nor does it receive an unusual number of take-down notices.
“I haven’t formally counted the number of take-down notices we’ve received, but if we get more than a few, it’s a big day,” he said. “If we represented truly the worst-case scenario, then copyright infringement can’t be a really big problem, because we don’t have that much.” —Erica R. Hendry
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