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More on campus attitudes

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the RIAA, responded to my previous post with a chart showing a sharp decline in the number of infringement notices sent to college campuses that had been piracy hotbeds in 2006-07. Contrary to the highly unscientific sample I cited, these numbers suggest that the RIAA’s enforcement efforts have made an impact on campus. Of course, students may have simply gotten better at concealing their file-sharing from The Man, found an alternative source of free music to replace Bit Torrent and Limewire, or put off their downloading until after Spring Break. But here’s Jonathan’s explanation of the data, followed by the chart (which you can download here) after the jump:

This is a ranking of schools receiving the most DMCA notices a year ago. We think the notices are a pretty good indicator of the extent of piracy on a campus: completely objective -- we are simply crawling the Internet and whatever we find, a notice is sent to the school. Because of these notices, because of the pre-lawsuit letters, because of the focus of Congress on these issues, many schools taken rigorous steps to discourage students from visiting illegal sites. Look at the notice reduction column during the past year. That means that many fewer incidences of piracy found on those campus networks, which used to have the most prolific incidences of piracy. That, I think, is pretty compelling and a different way of looking at the impact of our collective efforts.

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2006-07 Top 20 DMCA notices 06-07 DMCA notices 07-08 Change Current rank
University of South Carolina 914 45 -869 166
University of Massachusetts at Amherst 765 713 -52 2
Michigan State University 718 82 -636 118
Purdue University 679 458 -221 14
University of Nebraska-Lincoln 653 450 -203 16
University of Tennesee-Knoxville 651 372 -279 25
Howard University 569 10 -559 314
Ohio University 526 67 -459 141
University of Maine 440 461 21 12
University of Wisconsin-Madison 407 383 -24 23
North Carolina State University 387 593 206 6
University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire 382 134 -248 83
Syracuse University 373 73 -300 134
Kent State University 363 151 -212 70
Boston University 349 425 76 17
Northern Michigan University 344 30 -314 198
University of South Florida 388 117 -271 95
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater 315 0 -315 n/a
Indiana University 284 101 -183 106

Source: RIAA

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