Questionable Data
Are Coogs big-time pirates? Houston ranks in the nation's top 5 on illegaldownloads list
College dormitories are rife with horror stories about friends of friends getting busted for illegally downloading movies or music or games, but on-campus downloading has supposedly dwindled following university crack downs on illicit file-sharing.
That didn't signal a complete end to college piracy, according to a recent list on TorrentFreak.com ranking the top 50 universities for BitTorrent usage (BitTorrent allows the downloading of large files, often full movies or music). Based on information from from ScanEye, a site that monitors torrent files and tracks downloaders to individual universities according to IP addresses, several Texas universities are guilty as charged.
University of Houston, which has a student body of somewhere near 40,000, ranks No. 3 on the list.
University of Houston, which has a student body of somewhere near 40,000, ranks No. 3 on the list with 795 hits since November of last year.
Texas A&M University — which counts approximately 53,000 total students and whose code of honor outlines that an "Aggie does not lie, cheat or steal, or tolorate those who do" — falls just behind at No. 5 with 768 hits. The University of Texas at San Antonio takes No. 23 with 382 hits.
Those numbers are nothing compared to Rutgers University, which has more than 56,000 students and takes No. 1 with 1,809 hits. New York University ranks second with 986 hits.
TorrentFreak.com points out that BitTorrent is just the most heavily-monitored file sharing platform, and that some of the content available on the platform is legal (although Rutgers' top five files include Fast Five, Cars 2 and Puss in Boots — plus The Witcher 2: Assasins of Kings and Common's The Dreamer, The Believer).