14 DAY TRIAL // The study that the Motion Picture Association of America commissioned in 2005 regarding the domestic losses showed that a stunning 44 percent of those came because of illegal movie downloading done by college students. The MPAA rained fire on the colleges, urging them to limit the bandwidth or to willingly take drastic measures to prevent that from ever happening again, or else it would throw its weight behind the legislation before the House of Representatives and force them to do so.
All said and done, two years later they came back and admitted that there happened to be some human error involved with the results of the study and that the actual percentage of the losses back then caused by students was actually three times smaller, somewhere around 15 percent. In an attempt to cover the mistake in a cover of smoke, it claimed that even the newly discovered quota justified the efforts made by universities, according to the AP. The LEK conducted research claimed that the total revenue loss for 2005 was of 6.1 billion dollars and identified the typical pirate to be a male aged 16-24.
No additional errors were found in the study, the MPAA announced, but regardless of that, a third party will be hired to validate the numbers: "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 group said.
Now, a reply about the targeting of college campuses is to be expected, according to Terry Hartle, Vice President of the American Council on Education. He mentioned that file sharing is a nationwide problem and that by pointing fingers it would not be solved, especially if the direction they're pointed at is wrong.
Back in 2005, the MPAA even instituted a new Education Department, "to develop and disseminate information about copyright protection and awareness," as the website of the organization writes.