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Movie Industry Admits It Lied About Piracy On Campus

So it turns out the the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been caught in a lie that they have been claiming for more than two years: that more than 44% of all illegal downloading occurred on college campuses. The MPAA claims that this gross overstatement was due to human error. Right. Of course their original claims forced campuses to put the clamps on most all forms of Peer-2-Peer software.

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.

New York Times Technology News

Posted by | Wed, Jan 23, 2008 - 10:55 AM