Though there are many stringent rules against piracy, several young people across the nation still use torrent sites to get their hands on latest movies, music and sometimes even e-books!

A huge number of professionals have been urging the government to curb piracy, which has made the movie and music industry incur heavy losses. But despite the new laws, students are least concerned about who circulates these illegally downloaded files among themselves.

The government has therefore imposed strict rules on universities that inhibit the illegal sharing of files. If these rules are avoided, responsible schools might be liable to lose federal funding.

Yet students and sometimes staff continue to access these files on the university network.

TorrentFreak, which is a blog dedicated to reporting the latest news and trends on the BitTorrent protocol and file sharing, has ranked 50 universities based on their BitTorrent usage in collaboration with ScanEye.

ScanEye monitors hundreds of thousands of public torrent files, and based on IP-addresses, they can track downloaders back to individual universities, when these are listed as the IP-owner.

The ranking is topped by New Jersey's Rutgers University with 1809 hits, followed by NYU and University of Houston, with 986 and 795 hits respectively.

To round off the top 5 spots, University of Southern California and Texas A&M University have acquired fourth and fifth position.

In addition, TorrentFreak has mentioned in its disclaimer that if the universities have topped the list, it does not mean that every file they have downloaded is illegal. It also adds:

"There is plenty of legal content available on BitTorrent. However, a quick glimpse at the most downloaded content reveals that unauthorized sharing is relatively popular."

As per the data reviewed by Torrent Freak, the top 5 most downloaded files at Rutgers comprises the movies Fast Five, Cars 2 and Puss in Boots, the game The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and the album The Dreamer, The Believer by Common.

Microsoft Office for Mac and cult films such as Pulp Fiction are the most shared files in the Rutgers University network, says the blog.

Following are the Top 20 Universities with respect to BitTorrent usage.

Rutgers University

New York University

University Of Houston

University of Southern California

Texas A&M University

The George Washington University

University of Minnesota

State University of New York at Buffalo

University of Maryland

Tennessee State University

Northeastern University

Michigan State University

Wayne State University

Columbia University

Boston University

North Carolina Central University

University of California, San Diego

Old Dominion University

Ohio State University

For the complete list and number of hits, visit Torrent Freak.