For years, the Motion Picture Association of America has insisted that rogue college students are destroying the movie business through their evil peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

To make its case, the industry group waved around a 2005 study which purported to show that 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses came from college students armed with high-speed campus internet connections and an aversion to paying for content.

There was just one problem.

The 44 percent statistic was bunk, and now the M.P.A.A. is eating some serious crow after admitting that a "human error" caused them to screw up the number. The actual percentage of industry losses attributable to college students is just 15 percent, the group now says.

Oops.

"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," the M.P.A.A. said in a statement.

The erroneous statistic was a major component in the battery of arguments that the M.P.A.A. used to pressure colleges to crack down on illegal file-sharing. The group also used the figure to lobby Congress to pass legislation that would force colleges to take a tougher stance on illegal file-sharing.

The M.P.A.A. said that the consulting firm that it hired to perform the 2005 study, an outfit called L.E.K., discovered the error when it updated its findings for 2007. L.E.K. has worked closely with the major movie studios for years.

In fact, a senior executive at The Walt Disney Company, Kevin Mayer, formerly ran L.E.K's Global Media and Entertainment practice, Portfolio.com has learned.

Before he left L.E.K. to join Disney in June 2005, Mayer's responsibilities at the consulting firm included "the creation of comprehensive anti-piracy strategies for motion picture studios and trade associations," according to his executive bio. Mayer is currently Executive Vice President, Corporate Strategy, Business Development and Technology Group at Disney.

It is unclear what role Mayer may have played in the 2005 L.E.K. survey that the M.P.A.A. now says was erroneous. (A spokesperson for L.E.K. referred all inquiries to the M.P.A.A., which has not returned calls for comment.)

For now, the M.P.A.A.'s position appears to be, "Oh well, we screwed up. But hey, 15 percent is bad too, ya know?"

But some critics, such as Mark Luker, vice president of campus IT group Educause, say even the 15 percent figure is too high. Luker told the Associated Press that 3 percent is a more reasonable estimate of the industry's lost revenue due to campus file-sharing. And, as Luker pointed out, more than 80 percent of college students live off campus and aren't necessarily plugged in to super-fast college networks.

"The 44 percent figure was used to show that if college campuses could somehow solve this problem [on campus], then it would make a tremendous difference in the business of the motion picture industry," Luker said. The new number proves "any solution on campus will have only a small impact on the industry itself."

Needless to say, given how sanctimonious the M.P.A.A. - and the R.I.A.A., for that matter - have been about trying to pin blame for the industry's ills on college students, the reaction from the technorati has been largely marked by contempt.

Over at PC World, Scott Nichols all but accused the M.P.A.A. of intentionally deceiving Congress, not to mention the American public.

John Paczkowski hilariously updates Benjamin Disraeli over at All Things D.

"Turns out Benjamin Disraeli was wrong," he wrote. "There are four, not three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics and Motion Picture Association of America piracy figures."

"Why is this not surprising?" asked Kenneth C. Green, the director of The Campus Computing Project, when he was told about the error by a reporter for Inside Higher Ed.

"I've not seen the formal report of new -- and much lower -- numbers from the M.P.A.A. on campus P2P activity," he told the magazine. "But if the reports are true that the new, corrected numbers are way below the initial and highly publicized earlier numbers, then the M.P.A.A. owes an apology to the campus community. The corrected M.P.A.A. numbers clearly confirm what many of us have said for a very long time: that P2P piracy is primarily a consumer broadband issue, not primarily a campus network issue, and that colleges and universities are more concerned and far more engaged in efforts to stem illegal P2P activity than are consumer broadband providers."

by Sam Gustin