The educational institutions worldwide have been fighting a persistent piracy problem for a while now. Despite significant progress made over the past few years, there are still lots of illegal file-sharers present on college networks. TorrentFreak has taken a look at the top colleges in the country ranked by BitTorrent usage. The results can be seen below.

Although BitTorrent has lots of legal uses, much of the traffic passing through the network is still linked to copyright violation – both on regular ISPs and on university networks. Unlike consumer Internet providers, however, colleges are required by law to prevent copyright violation.
Three years ago, the American government added a new requirement for educational institutions to prevent unauthorized file-sharing on their networks. Under the law, a defiant college could lose federal funding if it failed to do its best to stop illegal file-sharing.
The universities all over the United States responded appropriately to the new rules and some of them even spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to install systems that help stop illicit file-sharing on their networks. Of course, despite all efforts college piracy hasn’t been completely eliminated.
As you can from the table compiled by TorrentFreak, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads the list with 1809 “hits” within the current year. The MIT is followed by Rutgers University with 986 hits. The top five also includes the New York University, the University of Houston and Texas A&M University.
It should also be noted that compared to 2012, the University of Illinois made the biggest jump from the 41st place to 6th, while The University of California, San Diego, ended in 19th place in 2012 and has since dropped out of the top 50.
It was also revealed that although students and staff are certainly pirating films, software and music, the piracy is not rampant, particularly if one takes into account that some colleges have hundreds of thousands of students, while a single student might generate several hits.
In comparison, most residential Internet service providers have millions of hits every month, and even the DHS has hundreds of pirates in its organization.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article