MPAA says it blamed too much on students
Leslie Primack
Issue date: 1/28/08 Section: Campus News
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The Motion Picture Association of America admitted last Wednesday that it overestimated the money lost because of illegal file sharing among college students by almost 300 percent. In a 2005 study, the MPAA blamed college students for 44 percent of its losses - a number that has recently been readjusted to 15 percent.
"The numbers were wrong, and we thought they were wrong, but we couldn't prove that," said Connie Sadler, director of information technology security. She feels that piracy is nothing unique to colleges but that entertainment corporations often target college networks because their high bandwidth makes downloading faster and because student contact information is easy to access.
The MPAA's study claimed a loss of $6.1 billion because of illegal movie downloading and file sharing, though most of the losses are attributed to piracy overseas. It attributed the miscalculation of student piracy to "human error," without elaborating.
"They're going to try to do things that they can get away with," said Joe Larios '10, treasurer of the Brown Film Society and a Herald comic artist. "The higher the figure that you can use with your lobbies in Congress, the easier it is to get legislation in your favor."
The MPAA is currently pushing for laws to make universities crack down harder on piracy within their networks. But this new statistic suggests that on-campus solutions to piracy would affect only a small percentage of the MPAA's profits.
"I don't think it's really a case of individuals wanting to steal intellectual property," Sadler said. "It's more of a case of consumers wanting to get content quickly and at a reasonable price."
She said the range of download options often leave consumers unsure what is legal and what is not. Sadler, like many Brown students, feels that the current ways of legally buying media do not meet consumers' expectations of convenience.