Yesterday, Arstechnica listed The RIAA’s Top 25 Piracy Schools:

The RIAA recently named the top 25 music-pirating schools in the country, an act that involved sending over 14,500 copyright infringement notices (so far) during the 2006-2007 school year. This was nearly triple the number of notices sent during the 2005-2006 school year, according to the RIAA. The group says, however, that they are taking advantage of new software tools to improve the tracking of illegal file sharing, which may be part of the reason why the numbers have skyrocketed.

The list, and something rather surprising, after the jump.

1. Ohio University – 1,287
2. Purdue University – 1,068
3. University of Nebraska at Lincoln – 1,002
4. University of Tennessee at Knoxville – 959
5. University of South Carolina – 914
6. University of Massachusetts at Amherst – 897
7. Michigan State University – 753
8. Howard University – 572
9. North Carolina State University – 550
10. University of Wisconsin at Madison – 513
11. University of South Florida – 490
12. Syracuse University – 488
13. Northern Illinois University – 487
14. University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire – 473
15. Boston University – 470
16. Northern Michigan University – 457
17. Kent State University – 424
18. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor – 400
19. University of Texas at Austin – 371
20. North Dakota State University – 360
21. Indiana University – 353
22. Western Kentucky University – 353
23. Seton Hall University – 338
24. Arizona State University – 336
25. Marshall University – 331

Notice something interesting?

No West Coast, let alone Southern California institutions, made the list (although one Engadget commenter noted that his friend at UCLA was recently busted).

Is that because their students are better at masking their activities (one commenter on Digg noted that “…geek schools like MIT, UC Berkeley, or Cal Tech aren’t on the list…” and commenters on Engadget thread mentioned software like PeerGuardian and SafePeer) or is the RIAA specifically targeting schools that are in the proverbial Heartland?

(Image courtesy of The Salacious Historian’s Lair.)