College students made up the biggest slice of the film industry’s pie chart for illegal movie downloads until recently. Now Hollywood is revising its numbers.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) announced in 2005 that college students were responsible for 44 percent of lost revenue on movie sales in the U.S. through their illegal downloading activities. The compelling statistics — detailed in the MPAA’s study on the international impact of movie piracy — underpinned an anti-piracy campaign targeting student offenders and urging universities to tighten their file-sharing policies.

This January, however, the MPAA announced that L.E.K. Consulting, the firm it hired to conduct this study, made a crucial miscalculation. It now estimates that only 15 percent of its revenue loss stems from college students. The MPAA chalks up the 29 percentage point mistake to “human error.”

Associate Information Security Officer David Hoffman, of Stanford’s Information Security Office (ISO), is wary of any statistics generated by the MPAA in regards to illegal downloading.

“We have no way of verifying them,” he said. “I don’t think anyone knows what the real numbers are.”

In Hoffman’s view, even the more recent conservative estimate — which will be examined by a “third party” consultancy along with the remainder of the 2005 study — is subject to doubt because he says there is no way for the public to know how the figures were obtained.

The ISO responds to complaints directed at Stanford students by what it has termed “bounty hunters” — companies that work in conjunction with the recording and film industries to identify and target copyright offenders. Hoffman explained that parts of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which was passed in 1998, oblige Stanford to field and investigate these claims.

“Our view of it is all driven by complaints,” he said. “We don’t police the Stanford network for [copyright] infractions.”

Although lawmakers have recently pressured campuses to adopt technology and protocol for preventing copyright infringements by students, Hoffman maintains that the ISO’s operations have not changed, as they are primarily dictated by the DMCA. He added that the MPAA, which is pushing a measure in Congress that would require universities to equip themselves against peer-to-peer piracy, exerts no influence over the way Stanford responds to complaints.

“We don’t act under their direction except to the extent they are often the ones filing complaints,” he said. “They don’t get to tell us what to do.”

Because the ISO does not answer to the MPAA, Hoffman anticipates that the Association’s computational error will have little bearing on the way his department administers fees and penalties to Stanford students who download movies illegally.

But copyright holders may get more bang for their buck by filing lawsuits against students directly rather than acting through the ISO.

According to Staff Counsel Lauren Schoenthaler of the Office of the General Council, in the past eight months the Recording Industry Association of America has brought claims against 34 Stanford computer users. She estimates that settlements for these claims amount to $100,000 collectively.

The University, Schoenthaler believed, disapproves of the way the industry has used isolated cases to intimidate other infringers.

“Stanford disfavors the recording industry’s current litigation campaign because it targets a few individuals with harsh consequences, but it does not seem to be making a marked change in file-sharing behaviors in general,” she said in an email to The Daily.

Schoenthaler fears that students will gain a false sense of security when they learn that the MPAA has overstated their role in the digital piracy problem.

“I worry that students will let their guard down because of this error and not think about file-sharing consequences,” she said.

As a legal advisor, Schoenthaler is privy to the personal tragedy that can accompany the seemingly de-personal, often anonymous act of downloading a movie or song.

“Stanford students who have been sued,” she said, “have come to my office in agony and literally crying and have considered dramatic solutions to the recording industry’s claims, such as bankruptcy or returning to a home country. “

“I think that I may be one of the few people who does see the suffering this campaign is causing to individuals,” she added, “because there does not seem to be a lot of talk about it in the broader Stanford student community.”