Despite Threats and Lawsuits, Students Continue to Download Music

College-aged illegal file downloaders are suddenly being forced to face the music. The recording industry, colleges, and the Internet providers on their networks are working together to prevent illegal file-sharing on university turf.

Some file-sharing sites, like Napster, started free and then, after legal troubles, became pay services. File-sharing programs and Web sites that offer free downloads, however, have not vanished from the Internet. This is because the majority of them are perfectly legal to own. The trouble comes when you download a song without already owning it."If everybody was downloading songs they already owned, nobody would be getting sued," said Alan Brill of Westchester Community College, "But that would defeat the purpose of music downloading."

Which is exactly why downloading has become a problem, especially for tech-savvy college students who know that millions of songs are just a button push and a short download away. What these students don’t know, however, is that the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA, does prosecute illegal downloaders.

According to the RIAA’s Web site, the record industry loses roughly $4.3 billion to illegal downloading every year. In retaliation, the RIAA has taken huge measures in prosecuting music pirates, many of which are your average high school and college students. It is also their policy, however, that it is better to educate the public than to prosecute. This is not to say that they won’t do what they feel they have to do: the RIAA works with authorities such as the FBI to help bring pirates down.

Needless to say, when a student at a well-known college is facing legal trouble just for downloading some music, it can be pretty bad PR for the school. For this reason colleges have recognized music downloading as a problem and have taken steps to reduce it. One such measure has been to provide music-sharing programs for students, legally and free of charge.

"We get Napster for free at Penn State, so we can only download music that was granted permission by the artist," said Denise McLaughlin, a junior at Penn State University.

This is the concept behind a program offered by Napster called "Napster University," and Penn State isn’t the only university that subscribes; other schools include the University of Rochester, Cornell and the University of Tennessee. These schools figure that if they provide the music, students won’t have to resort to breaking the law.

"The University wants to provide legal alternatives to illegal downloading. This service is directly aimed at helping students to understand the issue and providing them with an alternative," reads a Frequently Asked Questions page on the University of Tennessee’s Web site.

A representative of Napster predicts that, as technologies converge, music downloading will transcend the computer. Soon enough cell phones will be able to download songs beyond the grainy, low-quality ring tones currently available and will be able to receive and play music of listenable quality. Also, he predicts that pay-services are going to become increasingly popular in the future as the industry cracks down more and more on downloaders. These programs will most likely include subscription services where you pay a single fee for unlimited downloads. Or, as he put it, "all you can eat."

A lot of college students may not like the idea. After all, there are only so many things that one can get for free these days, and shouldn’t the artists be happy enough that people are enjoying what they create? Toby Gerard, a freshman downloader from the University of Denver, thinks so.

"I don't feel immoral about it," he said. "I don't think of it as stealing because these music artists make too much money for what they do. As artists they should be happy that they have fans who enjoy their music and what they create. They shouldn't be worried about money."

The problem, many artists say, is that the average musician is not a millionaire with a double-platinum album. But isn’t most of the music being downloaded from successful artists anyway? While a few bands like the now-deceased rock band Phish encouraged sharing of music as a means to reach a wider audience, recording artist Tool has his own take on the issue.

"Basically, it's about music - if you didn't create it, why should you exploit it? True fans don't rip off their artists."