Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

USF has found itself among the nation’s top universities in a new survey… of the nation’s top illegal music downloaders.

USF had the 11th-most reported violations in the list compiled by the RIAA, with 490 complaints so far this school year. WBUL Tech Director Dane Harmon says it’s inevitable USF shows up on the list.

They listed USF as the 11th highest trader of music, but the first thing that came to mind was, ‘Well, USF is the ninth-largest university in the nation [...] If you look at this on a per-capita basis, I really don’t think we’re that bad.

Yours truly’s alma mater, Ohio, took first place with an astounding 1,287 violation notices sent by the RIAA. OU officials point toward the high percentage of students living on-campus and question the RIAA’s data, citing no observable increased bandwidth use that would presumably accompany an increase in illegal downloading activity.

Of course, the RIAA’s charges have a tradition of being spurious — ask the 83-year-old grandma sued for allegedly downloading hardcore rap — and one wonders how comfortable we should be with Big Business crawling through our university networks looking for kids sharing music. “Students have more time than money,” the RIAA explains, and yet points at students’ music piracy as being a direct cause of the decline in music sales between 1999 and 2005. So which is it? And should the RIAA be spying on university network activity to begin with?