Top 25 US Universities as rated by the RIAA

I just laughed my ass off when I saw this article. This is too incredible. If you're finishing high school and would like to apply to study in a US university, this list might interest you. It's just about as useful as any of the other rankings published by a known media organisation, such as USA Today.

This ranking gives you the Top 25 US universities for copyright violations. That's right! It shows the number of copyright violation notices issued by the RIAA to each university. Typically, when the RIAA detects that a person has been downloading some songs illegally via P2P, they would issue a notice to the ISP to launch an investigation. In this case, the university is the ISP. So, there!

There are some good schools on the list too. So, who knows, you might actually be able to get a good education while enjoying the freedom do listen to any music that you want. One surprising thing is that most of the famous schools aren't listed. I'd expect geek infested places like MIT/Stanford to rank highly. Maybe these people just didn't get caught.

Anyway, this news should be taken less seriously in light of recent developments in the industry. It seems that the content providers have started to realise that DRM and related crap isn't going to sell with the consumers and they would need to change their marketing tactics to keep up with the times. So, maybe they'll stop pursuing the downloaders from now on and embrace the P2P distribution network.