Movie Industry Admits It Overstated Piracy on Campus

January 23, 2008, 9:38 am
Movie Industry Admits It Overstated Piracy on Campus
By MIKE NIZZA
While it’s not quite time for them to sing “Ding-Dong, The Witch Is Dead,” technology-obsessed writers on the Web are certainly celebrating an awfully embarrassing admission by the Motion Picture Association of America.

For more than two years, the association has drawn attention to a statistic that one blogger today termed “a big old lie” — that college students were responsible for 44 percent of the movie industry’s claimed domestic losses, because of prodigious illegal downloading.

On Tuesday, reports confirmed that the crow-eating had commenced, starting with this sharper-than-usual lead paragraph from The Associated Press:

Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now, it says its math was wrong.

The math was wrong by a factor of three; the new estimate is down to 15 percent of the industry’s losses. The A.P. deemed that a “mistake” in its headline, while bloggers joyously chose words like “bogus,” “botched,” “grossly inflated” and “lying” in theirs.

The M.P.A.A. said the original figure, from a 2005 study, was wrong because of “human error,” without elaborating. In a statement obtained by Inside Higher Education, the association said it was taking the error “very seriously” and vowing to investigate how it happened. But the association stuck to its offensive against college students:

“The latest data confirms that college campuses are still faced with a significant problem. Although college students make up 3 percent of the population, they are responsible for a disproportionate amount of stolen movie products in this country.”

At stake is the industry association’s campaign for a federal law requiring that colleges act to prevent “peer to peer” movie and music piracy on campus, known as P2P. Both the Senate and the House are considering versions of the measure, and it was unclear whether the news about the exaggerated loss estimates would affect the legislative climate. Education leaders, for one, are certainly hoping that it will, as Kenneth C. Green, the director of The Campus Computing Project, explained to Inside Higher Education:

“The corrected M.P.A.A. numbers clearly confirm what many of us have said for a very long time: that P2P piracy is primarily a consumer broadband issue, not primarily a campus network issue, and that colleges and universities are more concerned and far more engaged in efforts to stem illegal P2P activity than are consumer broadband providers.”

Not only is the industry group’s math wrong, Mr. Green said, but so are its manners: “The M.P.A.A. owes an apology to the campus community,” he is quoted as saying.