MPAA Admits Errors in Movie Piracy Study

Since 2005, the MPAA has famously blamed college students for a big portion of illegal movie downloading; now, the organization is admitting its numbers were wrong.

In 2005, the MPAA—the same organization that issued movie ratings—commissioned a study which purported to find that 44 percent of the U.S. film industry’s financial losses came from college students illegally downloading movies via high-speed campus networks. The organization has used the study to apply pressure to universities and other higher education institutions to crack down on access to peer-to-peer file-sharing services, and to pitch legislation (currently before the U.S. House of Representatives) aimed at forcing institutions to take a harder line on file-sharing.

Now, however, the MPAA is admitting to education groups—though not yet publicly on it’s Web site—that "human error" led it to give out the wrong number. Students downloading movies aren’t responsible for 44 percent of the industry’s domestic losses; instead, the MPAA now says the number is more like 15 percent.

"We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report," the MPAA said in a statement.

The original analysis was performed by research firm LEK, and claimed the industry lost $6.1 billion to piracy worldwide, with the majority of the losses coming from outside the United States. The MPAA says no errors have been found in the study other than the percentage of revenue loss that could be attributed to college students, and stands by its assertion that piracy amongst college and university students justifies tough policies on file-sharing. It does plan to engage a third party to review the remainder of the report’s figures, however.

IT professionals in educational institutions remains skeptical, noting that many students access the Internet from non-campus networks, implying the amount of piracy actually taking place on campus networks is even lower than the MPAA’s revised figure.