College students are, by and large, very frugal people. Most of them don’t have any money to spend on things like movies, music, or video games, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a lot of them illegally download media online. Though universities are trying to crack down on students who steal copyrighted material, there’s no way they can get everybody. Of course, some schools are worse than others. Torrent Freak put together a list of the 50 universities with the highest BitTorrent rates in the US.
The list is determined by the number of pings from university-owned IP addresses on known file-sharing sites. We’re not going to show you the whole list, but here’s the top 10, just so you can a sense of who the worst offenders are:
| 1 | Rutgers University | |
| 2 | New York University | |
| 3 | University Of Houston | |
| 4 | University of Southern California | |
| 5 | Texas A&M University | |
| 6 | The George Washington University | |
| 7 | University of Minnesota | |
| 8 | State University of New York at Buffalo | |
| 9 | University of Maryland | |
| 10 | Tennessee State University |
There’s no real significant pattern to which schools torrent the most: The top ten are spread out all over the country, and there’s a mix of private and state-run schools.
What kind of things students are downloading, you ask? At Rutgers, the biggest pirate school in the country, student are mostly looking for entertainment: Movies, music, and video games like Fast Five and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. It’s not all fun and games, though: useful software like Microsoft Office also ranked high on the school’s most downloaded list.
(via Torrent Freak, image credit: Chris Corwin)
- BitTorrent can be used against you in a court of law.
- I bet college students use The Pirate Bay, just like everybody else.
- Everyone loves The Pirate Bay, even the Canadian government.
