The Motion Picture Association of America has finally admitted that it overinflated the figures which claimed that college students were responsible for 44 percent of the movie industry’s claimed domestic losses, because of illegal downloading.

More specifically, MPAA spokesman Seth Oster said Wednesday that a 2005 study commissioned by the MMPAA "incorrectly concluded that 44 percent of the motion picture industry's domestic losses were attributable to piracy by college students."

Apparently, a newer, more accurate study has found that only 15 percent of the industry's domestic losses were caused by college students. Oster conveniently blamed the mistake on a human error. He still maintained that college students are responsible for a disproportionate amount of stolen movie products, because they only make up 3 percent of the population.

"We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report," Oster said.

The error might affect positively the outcome of a federal law requiring that colleges act to prevent peer-to-peer movie and music piracy on campus, considered by both the Senate and the House. MPAA's case was based primarily on the 44 percent figure, which was translated in $6.1 billion annual global piracy losses.

Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn rounded it up by saying that "MPAA owes the educational community an apology. And it owes the public an apology for trying to make its case for filtering the Internet and other Draconian measures on the basis of faulty information, faulty business models and a failure to adapt to changing times."

It's important to note that most college students live off-campus, which means that filtering campus Internet connections will have only a minimal effect. Furthermore, colleges can only filter all peer-to-peer traffic, not only illegal traffic. This means that they would arbitrarily choose to block access to very popular legal file sharing systems such as BitTorrent and others.