More on campus attitudes

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.