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:
1,198Columbia University 934University of Pennsylvania 891Boston University 889University of California at Los Angeles 873Purdue University 860Vanderbilt University 813Duke University 792Rochester Institute of Technology 765University of Massachusetts 740University of Michigan 714University of California at Santa Cruz 704University of Southern California 637University of Nebraska at Lincoln 636North Carolina State University 586Iowa State University 575University of Chicago 562University of Rochester 550Ohio University 527University of Tennessee 506Michigan State University 457Virginia Polytechnic Institute 455Drexel University 447University of South Florida 405Stanford University 398University of California at Berkeley
--Brock Read