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May is a month of potential and doubt. Named after Maia, the Roman goddess of growth, the month can suggest the coming of new and better things just as plants that sprout in April usually flower about now. However, the Romans also married Maia off to Mars, the god of war, and so the month can also stand for somber ceremonies honoring the dead.

Even the modern English use of the word “may” reflects this dichotomy, creating a sense of possibility that can be good or bad, depending on the context. For example, Tom Hanks may be perfect as Robert Langdon in “The Da Vinci Code,” but his hair may look worse than Donald Trump’s.

It’s perfectly fitting, then, that the first week of this May has brought out both the best and worst of times for Hollywood studios. Solstices aside, the end of April always marks the start of summer at the movies, when studio executives can finally relax for a few months while watching the box-office dollars roll in. The next four weeks will see the releases of “Mission: Impossible III” (May 5), “Poseidon” (May 12), “The Da Vinci Code” (May 19) and “X-Men: The Last Stand” (May 26), exactly the sort of action-adventure fare that defines contemporary American cinema.

However, the doubtful side is always more fun, especially when it comes to an institution as monolithic as the film industry. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal ran a story about a study commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of America that concludes the film industry loses $6.1 billion annually to piracy. To add insult to injury, the country responsible for the most losses isn’t located in Asia; the U.S. costs the film industry an estimated $1.3 billion alone every year.

In an effort to make itself seem more adept at its job, the MPAA quickly blamed college students for the deficit, sending letters to the presidents of 40 universities asking them to take action to stop piracy on college campuses. UCLA did not receive such a letter, but the effect is the same, revealing that the MPAA is more out of touch with reality than the one guy who complains about the midnight yell because he has a final the next morning and needs to study.

It’s alarmingly easy for media corporations to blame college students for piracy mainly because they know nothing about it. The incredibly unrealistic way in which that girl downloads a movie just by clicking a button that says “Download” in the commercial that used to play in theaters before previews shows how little the MPAA actually knows about the issue. It’s nowhere near that easy to download a movie on the Internet (not that I would know).

Additionally, that commercial presents piracy as a moral issue, which it definitely isn’t for college students. It’s one thing to blame college students, but it’s quite another to blame them for entirely the wrong reason. As long as downloading is free, but movie ticket prices and DVD prices continue to rise exponentially, poor college students will continue to download movies. It’s as simple as that. Why pay upward of $10 and help pay Tom Cruise’s salary by seeing “Mission: Impossible III” in theaters when you can see it for free a few days later?

I say this, for the record, as one of the biggest supporters of seeing movies in theaters. I fully believe it adds an element that can never be recreated, no matter how sophisticated home theaters get. Still, I can’t blame students for making economic decisions; theaters are worth the outrageous prices to me, but I know I take movies way too seriously.

Instead of whining about all the money it lost, the MPAA could take much more constructive steps to end mass piracy by actually coming up with an economics-based plan to stop it. I’m not convinced the majority of pirates are college students, but if they are, the movie industry needs to offer students more incentives to go to the movies or buy licensed DVDs.

If consumers stop buying a product, you don’t whine about their lack of morals. You make the product more appealing. Clearly the industry is not going to start making better movies, so it has to make those movies more appealing. Offering students a more enticing discount on tickets and DVDs could be a start, as could charging a small (less than $5, if that) fee to download movies legally at high quality. If iTunes can work, iFilms could too.

The question is still how the MPAA could be so out of touch with reality. Maybe its members just see too many movies.