Get Herald RSSThe recent revelation that the Motion Picture Association of America drastically overestimated its financial losses due to college students' illegal downloading of movies is, frankly, comforting to hear. The MPAA had previously blamed college students for 44 percent of its estimated $6.1 billion loss tied to illegal downloading, but last week it admitted that the correct figure was 15 percent. As college students, we should all be glad to feel less at fault; after all, the majority of us are upstanding citizens who get our media through legal means, despite what those cranky old lawyers wanted everyone to believe.
Whether this miscalculation was intentional or an honest error, it's already caused enough damage. The disproportionate blame on students has given the MPAA undue policy clout with federal regulating authorities and directly with universities. While piracy certainly still happens at Brown, it's likely far less of a problem than we previously thought. Does the University really need to be spending thousands of dollars on anti-piracy fliers and subscriptions to a legal downloading alternative? In recognition of its error, the MPAA should modify its policy initiatives to focus less on college students.
But these latest events don't really change the sad state of the film and music industries: In today's market, it is often easier, faster and cheaper to download movies and music illegally than it is to buy them - even from a well-entrenched, heavily used marketplace like the iTunes Music Store. Files that come from illegal sources are often of higher quality than those from legal sources, and they also lack digital rights management, or DRM, the restrictive scheme favored by the MPAA and RIAA as the model for future distribution. We do not promote illegal downloading, nor do we believe that all digital media should be free, but as consumers, we can certainly ask that the legal solution be as quick, comprehensive and high-quality as the best illegal sites.
The MPAA and its co-conspirator in resisting modernity, the Recording Industry Association of America, have spent most of the past decade suing their customers instead of creating a new distribution model. Meanwhile, open-source software such as BitTorrent has stepped in to provide the fastest means of distributing digital content. If the MPAA wants to reduce illegal downloading, it will have to cooperate with innovators to offer customers easy, fast, relatively inexpensive and device-independent downloads.
Brown's response to students' illegal downloading hasn't been too successful either. University officials deployed Ruckus, a legal, DRM-ridden alternative to illegal downloading of music, in September 2006. Without ownership, though, Ruckus is not a viable long-term solution. The consumers have spoken: We want to own our music and movies, and we generally won't settle for compromises that stop us from putting them on our iPods or TVs.
What can Brown do? Not very much, though it should look beyond Ruckus for something compatible with more students' computers. But since we no longer should be seen as the culprits of nearly half of all illegal downloading in the United States, we as college students deserve more leverage in asking for reasonable, fast, easy and legal ways to purchase digital media.
