Movie Industry Admits It Overstated Piracy on Campus

By Mike Nizza
NYT blog

While it’s not quite time for them to sing “Ding-Dong, The Witch Is Dead,” technology-obsessed writers on the Web are certainly celebrating an awfully embarrassing admission by the Motion Picture Association of America.

For more than two years, the association has drawn attention to a statistic that one blogger today termed “a big old lie” — that college students were responsible for 44 percent of the movie industry’s claimed domestic losses, because of prodigious illegal downloading.

On Tuesday, reports confirmed that the crow-eating had commenced, starting with this sharper-than-usual lead paragraph from The Associated Press:

Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now, it says its math was wrong.

The math was wrong by a factor of three; the new estimate is down to 15 percent of the industry’s losses. The A.P. deemed that a “mistake” in its headline, while bloggers joyously chose words like “bogus,” “botched,” “grossly inflated” and “lying” in theirs.

(Continued here.)