Universities Baffled By Massive Surge In RIAA Copyright Notices

Found on Wired on Friday, 02 May 2008
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In the last 10 days, universities around the country have seen more than a 20-fold increase in the number of filesharing takedown notices from the recording industry.

Indiana University says that starting on April 21, the Recording Industry Association of America began sending 80 legal notices a day to the university, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

But many of the recent notices don't correspond to entries in traffic logs, which also don't show any overall increase in file sharing, Bruhn said.

"They in fact can't know if the files being offered are actually the protected works of their clients -- how would they know if they didn't download and open them?" Bruhn said.

University of California at Berkeley's chief information officer Shel Waggener confirmed he'd heard of the spikes and suggested there was a political purpose driving them.

For more than two years, the industry claimed that more than 40 percent of illegal movie downloads came from college students -- costing the industry billions of dollars. Then in January of this year, the estimate was reduced to 15% for college-aged students, and only 3% occurring on campus networks.

It seems like they are increasing their threat letters in order to whine in a few months about how much piracy has increased; something which could lead to overblown legislations. A cunning plan indeed. However, in the end, they just cry wolf. I don't trust any of their "official" reports; not even remotely. For me, the industry has turned into nothing but a conglomerate of shady liars.