March 30, 2007
The MPAA's Most Wanted
Just over a month ago the Recording Industry Association of America released a list of universities allegedly beset by music piracy -- 25 institutions that, over the last academic year, had received more notices identifying cases of copyright infringement than any of their counterparts (The Chronicle, February 21).
Now the Motion Picture Association of America has drafted a worst-offenders list of its own, and the document might turn some heads. The list, which was compiled at the request of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, uses the same methodology as the record industry's roster.
And it names several of the same institutions: Ohio University, which topped the RIAA's rap sheet, ranked 18th on the MPAA's tally. Purdue University, which placed second on the RIAA's list, finished fifth on the MPAA's.
Rep. Howard L. Berman, a Democrat from California, assailed Purdue for doing too little to curtail campus piracy at a hearing held last month by the Judiciary Committee. At the same hearing, he effusively praised the antipiracy tactics of the University of California at Los Angeles, which uses a program that automatically kicks song-swapping students off peer-to-peer networks.
So it's something of a surprise to see UCLA sitting fourth on the MPAA's list, one spot above Purdue. And it's also surprising that the University of Rochester, one of the very first institutions to offer students free access to legal downloading services, made the list at 17th. The message seems clear: There's no foolproof way to keep students from downloading, short of tying them to classroom chairs. Here's the MPAA's complete list of colleges, along with the number of copyright-infrigement notices they received:
| 1,198 | Columbia University |
| 934 | University of Pennsylvania |
| 891 | Boston University |
| 889 | University of California at Los Angeles |
| 873 | Purdue University |
| 860 | Vanderbilt University |
| 813 | Duke University |
| 792 | Rochester Institute of Technology |
| 765 | University of Massachusetts |
| 740 | University of Michigan |
| 714 | University of California at Santa Cruz |
| 704 | University of Southern California |
| 637 | University of Nebraska at Lincoln |
| 636 | North Carolina State University |
| 586 | Iowa State University |
| 575 | University of Chicago |
| 562 | University of Rochester |
| 550 | Ohio University |
| 527 | University of Tennessee |
| 506 | Michigan State University |
| 457 | Virginia Polytechnic Institute |
| 455 | Drexel University |
| 447 | University of South Florida |
| 405 | Stanford University |
| 398 | University of California at Berkeley |
--Brock Read
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I guess MPAA is more of a “Do as I say not as I do” organization.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/17/mpaa_rips_off_freewa.html— Concerned Citizen Apr 2, 11:14 AM #
As someone responsible for managing network resources, I surely hope that government and higher education executives steer clear of throwing technological solutions at a social / political issue.
— Matthew Hall Apr 2, 02:57 PM #
I’m a student at Columbia, so I have to laugh about this. They send out warning letters occasionally to try to deter this, but inevitably it fails.
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