College Pirates? U.S. Universities Ranked by BitTorrent Usage
- Ernesto
- September 8, 2013
- 25
- piracy
-
BitTorrent has plenty of legitimate uses but much of the traffic that passes through can be linked to copyright infringement.
This is true on all regular Internet providers but also on university networks. Unlike consumer ISPs, however, educational institutions are required by law to prevent copyright infringement to the best of their ability.
In 2010 the U.S. Government added a new requirement for colleges and universities to stop illicit file-sharing on their networks. This legislation puts a defiant school at risk of losing federal funding if it doesn’t do enough to stop illicit file-sharers on its campus.
Schools across the country responded appropriately to the new rules and some institutions have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to install anti-file-sharing systems on their networks. While these efforts may have been somewhat successful, college piracy hasn’t been completely eliminated.
With help from the BitTorrent monitoring outfit Scaneye we were able to see the presence of individual universities on the popular file-sharing protocol. Scaneye looks at the IP-addresses that are sharing files on BitTorrent, and records every encounter as a “hit.” More hits therefore means that BitTorrent usage is more prevalent on the network.
As can be seen on the table below, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads the list with 1809 “hits” since January 1 of this year. Rutgers University follows in second place with 986 hits.
The rest of the top five is made up by New York University, the University of Houston and Texas A&M University.
Compared to last year the University of Illinois made the biggest jump from the 41st place to 6th. Conversely, The University of California, San Diego, was in 19th place last year and has since dropped out of the top 50.
Since BitTorrent can be used for many legitimate purposes we took several samples of the content being downloaded on the university networks, and the majority is clearly infringing.
While students and staff are certainly pirating movies, software and music, it is certainly not rampant. Especially when you take into account that some universities have hundreds of thousands of students, and that a single student can generate several hits.
To put things in perspective, most residential ISPs have millions of hits every month, and even the Department of Homeland Security has hundreds of pirates in its organization.
Below is the full list of the top 50 universities ranked by (absolute) BitTorrent usage in 2013. The older 2012 ranking of universities based on the student population is available here.
Universities ranked by BitTorrent usage
#2012UniversityHits
torrentfreak.com
1(1)Massachusetts Institute of Technology1935
2(2)Rutgers University1851
3(3)New York University1401
4(4)University Of Houston1088
5(6)Texas A&M University900
6(41)University of Illinois850
7(12)Northeastern University826
8(…)Georgia Institute of Technology741
9(15)Columbia University722
10(13)Michigan State University702
11(39)University of Washington699
12(10)University of Maryland689
13(5)University of Southern California679
14(7)The George Washington University671
15(37)University of California at Berkeley613
16(8)University of Minnesota613
17(16)Boston University591
18(…)University of California, Los Angeles580
19(21)Ohio State University561
20(1)Ohio State University558
21(…)Rochester Institute of Technology550
22(30)Purdue University522
23(17)Vanderbilt University521
24(27)University of Colorado518
25(46)University of Utah494
26(…)University of Chicago482
27(…)Stanford University434
28(14)Wayne State University411
29(49)Duke University410
30(…)University of North Texas405
31(…)State University of New York at Stony Brook398
32(23)Case Western Reserve University388
33(11)Tennessee State University378
34(…)University Of South Florida373
35(42)Georgetown University366
36(…)University of Oklahoma364
37(33)Lindenwood University364
38(26)The Pennsylvania State University359
39(…)Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ.359
40(48)University of Pennsylvania351
41(45)University of Wisconsin Madison343
42(9)State University of New York at Buffalo339
43(22)University of Michigan334
44(…)Claremont University334
45(…)University of California, Santa Cruz326
46(…)Iowa State University324
47(40)Fordham University320
48(18)North Carolina Central University318
49(36)Grambling State University318
50(…)University of Texas at Arlington309
surprised that HBCU allowed that much bandwidth to be considered for the list, especiall considering the amount of 
girls ruuning around there
@ MIT
I started the torrent while in the library. Like a week later, I got an email from the school saying that NBC contacted them. It ended up not being a big deal though, I had to call some tech support number to get my campus internet access granted again, and I also had to go in to some meeting.
