MIT tops US college rankings - when it comes to illegal downloading

The US News and World Report college rankings have just come out, and everyone from students to alumni, and journalists to parents are eating up the information. Which college went up, and which one went down? Did Harvard get edged out by Princeton? (It did.)

But torrenting website BitTorrent has revealed university rankings based on a different criteria - how much do US colleges torrent?

[caption id="attachment_1103905" align="alignleft" width="380"] Representational image/ AFP[/caption]

Torrentingallows users to share large and medium-sized files online, though they are best known - and most used - for the copyrighted material people use torrenting to illegally distribute. Everything from Pirate Bay to Kickass Torrents can instantly throw up free copies of the latest movies to new music albums.

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Topping the chart is Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with 1,935 recorded "hits" of torrenting activity. Rutgers, New York University, University of Houston and Texas A&M followed, all having at least 900 downloads.

"With help from the BitTorrent monitoring outfitScaneyewe 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," says Torrent Freak.

The torrenting numbers in universities however, remains relatively small, as the post points out. Some of this can be attributed to the pressure put on colleges and universities to stop illegal downloading, to the point where federal funding is often on the line.

Before you give the benefit of the doubt and think college students are probably downloading a lot of - legally available - think again. "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," says Torrent Freak.

Read the full ranking here.