MPAA BADLY MISLED CONGRESS OVER COLLEGE PIRATING

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ARS TECHNICA - After commissioning a 2005 study from LEK Consulting that
showed collegiate file-swappers were responsible for 44 percent of movie
studio "losses" to piracy, the MPAA then used the report it bought to
bludgeon Congress into considering legislation to address this massive
problem. Now the MPAA admits that the report's conclusions weren't even
close to being right; collegiate piracy accounts for only 15 percent of
"losses." Oops. And that's assuming you believe the rest of the data.

The Associated Press broke the news; apparently, the MPAA is busy
notifying government and education officials about the blunder, which
may explain why it's too busy to post a mea culpa to its web site. The
group blames "human error" for the calculation problem. . .

Howard Berman (D-CA), a powerful Congressman from Hollywood who does
plenty of work with IP issues, bought the complete bill of goods. In
March of 2007, we reported on Berman's veiled threats against
universities and colleges in the US, comments apparently based in part
on the now-discredited report.

"Indeed, the statistics demonstrate that students engage in rampant
piracy," he said at the time, "and while Congress has given universities
many exemptions from copyright liability it might be time to condition
some of those exemptions on action taken by universities to address the
piracy problem."

This attitude led to bills like the College Opportunity and
Affordability Act of 2007, still pending a vote in the House. That bill
directs schools to "develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal
downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as
well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such
illegal activity."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080122-oops-mpaa-
admits-college-piracy-numbers-grossly-inflated.html


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