For three years, the Digital Citizen Project at Illinois State University has been doing some very interesting research and data analysis on what their students actually do (versus what they say they do) in terms of illegal file sharing. The first two papers that have been published out of this research are Dimensions of P2P and digital piracy in a university campus (Mateus and Peha, CMU, 2008) and Intention to Engage in Digital Piracy (Taylor, Ishida, Wallace, ISU, 2009). More papers are coming. (Disclosure: I have been on the DCP’s advisory committee from July 2008.)

The Mateus paper sought to quantify the level of digital piracy over a period of time in 2007: very loosely speaking, more than 119,000 potential infringements were detected over about a 25-day period in April 2007. Food for thought when you contrast that with the typical level of DMCA claims of infringement an institution typically receives.

A service which has come out of the DCP is Birdtrax, a list of legal sources of digital entertainment media maintained by the folks at ISU. With so much happening in this space these days, it’s great someone is taking on this task to help sort through this new world of content.

I’ll mention here Casey Green’s 2008 survey on The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance, which for the first time begins to quantify what colleges and universities are spending to combat this type of illegal activity. It’s a nice complement to the Mateus paper.