Harvard shares responsibility for the recent surge in digital piracy, Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti said in a speech yesterday in the Kirkland House Senior Common Room.

“Harvard needs to let students know its policy, that downloading movies on peer-to-peer networks is stealing,” Valenti said.

Valenti, the man who designed the current system for rating movies in America after serving as special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam War, had met with University President Lawrence H. Summers earlier yesterday morning to discuss the movie industry’s piracy concerns.

According to Valenti, most Internet connections in use today aren’t fast enough to download movies in a reasonable amount of time. College ethernets, however, are a notable exception.

“Colleges like Harvard have huge pipelines,” Valenti said. “Would you believe that 85 percent of movie downloads in America occur on college campuses?”

Valenti stressed that downloading copyrighted information is tantamount to theft.

“I’m sure none of you would walk into a Blockbuster and furtively slip a DVD into your jacket. That’s a Winona Ryder thing,” he said. “But how many of you have been on Kazaa or Morpheus?”

At Valenti’s insistence, most of the 40 or so undergraduates in the tightly crowded room hesitantly raised their hands.

Valenti cited a test he did on Kazaa to see how much data was being shared at a given moment; he said that Kazaa reported over four million connected users at the time he checked.

“That’s one hell of a lot of information being shared,” Valenti said.

He then addressed the idea of “fair use” of downloaded media, especially the supposed right of legitimate DVD owners to have backup copies.

“Why do you need a backup copy?” he said. “The original DVD is copy-protected, and anyway a DVD lasts forever. We’re not trying to stifle fair use, we’re just doing what we have to to stay alive.”

He explained the heavily damaging impact that peer-to-peer networks have