Sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it? Remember the good ol’ days? I sure do, and so does my “favourite” organization – the MPAA, for they seem to still be living in this fabled period of time…

This post was inspired by the coincidence of two pieces of related news that really got my attention yesterday – the admission of a very significant error by the MPAA and a blog post that I read, highlighting the potential for an increasingly affected Net Generation to exert their influence in the next Canadian federal election.

In a report released Tuesday, the MPAA revealed that a major statistic from its groundbreaking 2005 study proclaiming that college students were stealing nearly half of their industry’s revenue was wrong – nearly 300% wrong. The original report claimed that 44% of the motion picture industry’s domestic revenue losses were a result of illegal downloading over campuses’ high speed networks. While skeptics knew that 44% seemed quite high, students were an easy target, and the study was used to encourage (and almost legally mandate) that colleges across the US beef up their anti-piracy efforts. Yesterday’s release proves that the skeptics were right and that such gaping losses were NOT caused by student downloads (but rather by a stone-aged business model – sorry, I couldn’t resist interjecting my two cents) and that the true figure is actually closer to 15%, with “human error” to blame for the discrepancy.

While the MPAA data are based on US figures, the issue of campus downloading and piracy is also hotly-contested in Canada, and it has the potential to significantly influence the next federal election, as Michael Geist points out in his recent post. Geist highlights what he calls the Copyright MPs (Members of Parliament) – MPs who won their last election by a margin of less than 10% and whose riding is home to a university. The table below illustrates the ten closest such MPs:

The potential for influential change comes from the opportunity for aspiring MPs to challenge each of these now Conservative incumbents, on the issue of copyright legislation currently championed by Industry Minister and fellow Conservative MP, Jim Prentice. While students are often criticized for voter apathy, if there is a single issue that has the potential to galvanize the Canadian N-Gen student population, I bet that copyright legislation could very well be it. The currently-proposed legislation has been criticized as being anti-education, anti-consumer, and anti-business and for opportunistic (and wise) MPs, this could be just the break they’re looking for to get their voices heard and votes counted.

The table column highlighted in yellow illustrates the percentage of each university’s population that is represented by the margin of victory in the last election. With an average riding population of +/-107,000, it appears that campuses could present a great opportunity to capture (or stimulate, then capture) the winning vote. Some of these margins are considerable, but for at least the smallest two, the number of required votes represents less people than were enrolled many of my freshman and sophomore survey courses. (These percentages also exclude university employees, who for a number of these cities comprise a significant percentage of total employment.)

Regardless of whether or not the student vote does in fact influence the next election (or there even is an imminent election), in my mind the issue remains the same – the MPAA has once again missed the boat. While I do not condone acts of piracy, whether it is 44, 15 or even 75% of revenue lost, it is time for the MPAA to stop their witch hunt and read and OBEY the writing on the wall. Educated students have historically been the lightning rod of things to come and the MPAA really is missing yet another opportunity by not listening to what these students are saying with their online activity – this illegal downloading is a symptom of an industry living in the past. The time for a new business model is NOW (well, really five or 6 years ago, but now is better than nothing, for all parties concerned).