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Colleges are going to have to start screening their networks to try and curb illegal file sharing and downloading.

I don’t know much about the logistics of Information Technology Departments on a college campus, but this seems like it’s one more headache for our already overburdened IT departments. IT people are busy enough, and now this is going to fall on their shoulders? I’d rather our IT departments help students and faculty make use of technology that’s useful for teaching and learning. Now they get to play police.

What’s worse. If you read the article, the MPAA was wrong about the economic impact of college student downloads. The MPAA estimated that 44% of the profit loss is due to college campus downloads. It turns out they were off by about 30%. If I did my math right, college campuses are (at best) responsible for about 14% of the profit losses.

I’d be interested to know that the cost and upkeep will be to implement a network filtering system (and patching it every time someone hacks around it) for all of the college campuses.

6 Responses to “College Opportunity and Affordability Act = Network Filtering”

  1. Justin Webb

    30% seems like an extremely large margin of error in their estimation. What were the figures used in the calculation?
    And do you think that perhaps they knew about the calculations and tried to deceive the public so that this ongoing problem was inflamed?

    If so, I think it’s pertinent to ethics.

    Thoughts?

  2. Maury The Beetle

    It takes less time to list the few times that the RIAA has been right about anything than to list the agency’s mistakes. That they’d be off by 30 percent or more is yet one more stumbling block in their argument against a changing music industry. The reality is, whether or not we agree with the idea of downloading music, the old CD format is dying. The RIAA believes it can sue it back to life – but technology is against them, and once that sort of thing is out of the box, it is terribly difficult to put back in.

  3. Andrew Cullison

    Justin:

    I’m not sure what figures were used. I only know what the article said… Here’s a quote from the end.

    Opponents of the bill’s IP provisions had hoped that the MPAA’s inaccurate numbers might derail that section of the legislation…For the last several years, the MPAA has claimed that college students are responsible for 44 percent of film piracy “losses” in the US; after reviewing the numbers recently, though, the MPAA realized that a mistake had been made. The numbers have since been revised downward by nearly two-thirds.

    I assume that means they’ve reduced their estimate from 44% to somewhere in the neighborhood of 14-15%

  4. Justin Webb

    Well, it might be closer to 29-30%; it says that the numbers have been revised by nearly two-thirds, so if we take the absolute maximum of 67% times the 44%, we get an estimate of 29.5%.

    No matter, it still seems like 15% is a substantial margin of error when asserting a criminal claim such as this “digital piracy.”

  5. Andrew Cullison

    That’s the problem. It’s unclear how those numbers are supposed to be crunched.

    You’re reading “off by two-thirds” to mean that the actual percentage of profit loss is 2/3 the number they estimated.

    I was reading it as follows: calculate two-thirds of the actual profit loss percentage (which is in the neighborhood of 30) and subtract that from 44 – because that’s another way to read “off by two-thirds”

  6. Justin Webb

    I see, you’re absolutely correct; it is rather ambiguous. I’m not sure how to read it; I suppose we’d have to see more of the numerical data.

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