Filed at 3:21 p.m. ET

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Film and recording industry advocates are appealing to universities nationwide to help crack down on Internet-based piracy, which costs the entertainment world billions of dollars in lost revenues every year.

In a letter sent to more than 2,300 colleges, entertainment industry leaders called on the universities to educate students against pirating music and movies over broadband Internet lines available on most campuses.

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``We're simply trying to appeal to the universities for their help in making students aware of Internet theft,'' Jack Valenti, the president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday. Valenti was one of four signatories on the letter.

``Students need to know that just because everyone is doing it doesn't make it right,'' he added.

In addition to educating students that piracy is tantamount to ``electronic shoplifting,'' the industry trade groups called on the universities to implement penalties on violators.

Most universities offer high-speed Internet connections in dorm rooms and computer labs, which some students use illegally to share or swap MP3 files and some film files. Peer-to-peer technology now allows computer users to tap into one another's hard drives and share files.

Using 56K, or dial-up connections, films can take up to 12 hours to download, Valenti said. By comparison, high-speed connections allow feature films to be downloaded to a computer in minutes.

Universities have been targeted because they are a common source of high-speed connections in the United States, where only 13 million homes have high-speed Internet access.

The exchange of copyrighted files is not only a violation of federal law, it consumes valuable academic resources, the letter signatories said.

``Stealing is stealing is stealing, whether it's done with sleight of hand by sticking something in a pocket or it's done with the click of a mouse,'' the letter's authors said.

Ever since the music-swapping software Napster emerged in the late 1990s, students have been using enormous swaths of university bandwidth intended for the exchange of research data and other academic-oriented files.

Quoting the Chronicle of Higher Education, the letter's authors said one university discovered that at least 75 percent of its available bandwidth had been used by students and people outside the university while exchanging files using peer-to-peer technology.

Songwriters Guild of America President Rick Carnes warned that copyright violations threaten the future of the recording arts in the United States.

``Copyright encourages the promotion of new arts in our culture,'' said Carnes, who has written songs for Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire. ``Without those copyright protections, the future of the arts is threatened.''

The letter also was signed by Hilary Rosen and Edward Murphy, the presidents, respectively, of the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Music Publishers' Association.

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On the Net:

http://riaa.org/

http://mpaa.org/

http://nmpa.org/

http://songwriters.org/