Future Leaders of America Are Pirates
By Louis in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 3, 2007 3:30PM
Ah, the storied halls of America's finest institutions, the bastions of educational excellence, and the homes of our country's future leaders. Columbia, Boston, Penn, Duke, Vanderbilt, and yes, the University of Chicago — these are just a few of the schools that have long ranked as the best of the best.
Not in the eyes of the RIAA and MPAA. These schools are epicenters of the widespread evil known as piracy and the most recent target for lawsuits against file sharers. On a list of the largest university offenders of copyright infringement (piracy), University of Chicago comes in at number 16 in movie piracy. Nearby, Purdue even managed to take the gold star as highest overall ranking on the RIAA and MPAA lists.
The schools on the list show no discernible pattern, since many of the nation's largest universities didn't even make the cut.
The MPAA estimates that 44% of all illegal copyright users are college students, and those rich bastards are holding out on ol' Daddy MPAA to the tune of $500 million a year. That money rightfully belongs to the Church of Scientology.
That is why the RIAA and MPAA have helped to introduce the Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act, which would allow universities to tap the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) Program to fund "innovative on-campus, anti-piracy pilot programs designed to reduce digital piracy."
Also, in the continuing good fight against university students, the RIAA is now allowing them to pre-emptively settle their lawsuit if they have been subpoenaed. Since University of Chicago only runs a paltry $34,000 a year, if you get one of the recently sent 400 RIAA letters, just head on over p2plawsuits.com to clear your name for a small fee. Well, you may have to drop out of school since the current going rate is about $750 per infringing song (one student was hit up for $590,000).
Oh, yeah, and EMI announced that songs on iTunes will no longer have DRM, but you won't be able to afford them when they become available in May if you just settled with the RIAA.