Date: 21st February 2001

Piracy On Campus


Students on college campuses with high-speed Internet access are downloading full-length features onto their PCs with increasing frequency, CNN reported Tuesday.

"There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 350,000 to 400,000 feature-length films being downloaded per day, which is about double what we saw when we started tracking this about 18 months ago," technology consultant Andrew Frank told the news network.

According to CNN, the videos approach the quality of DVDs and often exceed the quality of VHS recordings. Moreover, there does not appear to be a primary, Napster-like clearing house for them, making it difficult for the MPAA or law enforcement to crack down on the distribution. One unidentified downloader told CNN: "They're all peer-to-peer connections. So there is no central server. There is no company that's running it."

Source: Studio Briefing