Leaked MediaDefender Emails Show Student P2P Traffic Down

An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA and the RIAA have been targeting universities in a fury claiming that college students are causing them huge losses. However, some leaked MediaDefender emails show that may be a huge exaggeration. 'I also want to state that I am not for the illegal sharing of files. I am absolutely against it. I just want to make sure that the numbers presented in the media are fair numbers. I have a feeling they aren't fair at all. '"

Comments

Bogus

[neokushan]

The MPAA and the RIAA have been targeting universities in a fury claiming that college students are causing them huge losses.

This is a bogus claim anyway, everyone knows college kids (aka Students) are piss poor and couldn't afford to buy the music even if they didn't download it.
Now they're just piss poor and bored.

Re:Bogus

[p0tat03]

I call bullshit wishful thinking.

I am in college, and I've been to the campuses of MANY others, for one reason or another, and while it's true that you've got some college students eking by on savings and loans, being very judicious in their spending, the vast majority are supported by middle-class parents, and have plenty of disposable income.

No, indeed, while I am no fan of the MAFIAA, there IS a very real problem with our young people and their perceptions on copyright. The general consensus is that if they didn't have to filch if off a store shelf, it's morally a-ok, and this mentality pervades every college campus I've ever been to. I'll leave the psychological analysis of the why to people better qualified than I, but it is undeniable that the average college student thinks nothing wrong with piracy. It's perceived as a victimless crime.

Seriously, if you can spend thousands boozing yourself up each year, you can't make the excuse that you're too poor to buy DVDs.

Re:Bogus

[LordLucless]

No, indeed, while I am no fan of the MAFIAA, there IS a very real problem with our young people and their perceptions on copyright.

Either that, or there is a real problem with our copyright law.

There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[compumike]

Just take a look at this recent opinion piece to MIT's newspaper. Here's a student who believes that "the free flow of information" (as he says twice) is the ultimate good. Lots of students still don't understand why copyright exists. In fact, some will even try to explain that physical property is the only kind that should have value. It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.

Even the GPL and all copyleft mechanisms rely on copyright laws. If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[QuoteMstr]

Actually, the popularity of a law is its /very basis/ for legitimacy, at least in a democratic society. Who gets to decide what policy can "better service society" except the very members of that society? The law should reflect common morality, not some notion three guys in a room decided was best.

Every time the law has been used as a club to force the public to accept a minority moral position, it's failed to have the desired effect. Remember learning about the prohibition?

maybe there are other explanations

[petes_PoV]

• students have found ways to not be discovered
• the students have got all the stuff they want
• there's nothing much worth downloading at present
• (my favourite) The RIAA are getting tired of the "war" so they're engineering a victory. Look! our stats say we've won - we can stop now.
• possibly the stats are over the summer, when the colleges were empty

Just like house prices, you can't draw any real conclusions from a single data point. Give it a year and see if there's still a downward trend or if this was just a blip

I wonder.

[palegray.net]

I wonder how many students at technical colleges and universities are using BitTorrent to download Linux ISOs, free software packages, etc...

I know that's what I use it for (no, I'm not kidding).