In the never-ending war on piracy, the MPAA, RIAA, and other industry lobbying arms have done some pretty heinous things, so lying about numbers… excuse me, incorrectly deducing statistics that just so happened to force colleges and universities into adopting industry-supported anti-piracy measures… is the least of the things they’ve done.  I’d rather the MPAA spread propaganda rather than illegal rootkits like Sony included on CDs, simply because propaganda is more effective and less damaging in a monetary sense.

But just how off were the numbers?  From the IMDB: 

The Motion Picture Association of America has acknowledged that a study that it commissioned in 2005 — that concluded that widespread illegal downloading of movies on college campuses was responsible for billions of dollars in losses — was wrong. The study had claimed that students with access to high-speed Internet connections in college dorms were to blame for 44 percent of the industry’s domestic losses from online pirating. However, on Tuesday, the MPAA admitted that it got the figure wrong because of "human error" and that it was more like 15 percent. But Mark Luker, vice president of Educause, told the Associated Press Tuesday that the study did not take into account the fact that 80 percent of college students live off campus. He figured that campus networks may be responsible for only 3 percent of illegal downloads. The industry’s earlier figure, he maintained, was intended to show that if college campuses got tough on the issue of illegal downloads, "it would make a tremendous difference in the business of the motion picture industry." He said that the new figures show that campus action would "have only a small impact." For its part, the MPAA said Tuesday, "We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report."

Fool me once, shame on you, MPAA.  Excuse me if I don’t buy any of your anti-piracy arguments ever again.  As we all know, statistics are the third type of lies, and I’ve always been more than a little suspicious that piracy is always blamed for flagging sales, rather than industry bloat, a constant rehashing of older/better films, lousy conditions in theaters, and the economy. 

DVD sales certainly haven’t slowed down, and people have been bootlegging movies for 30 years.  At least with a fake DVD you don’t have to watch annoying anti-piracy adverts, and you can be sure it’ll play on whatever DVD player you have.