ennsylvania State University has agreed to cover the cost of providing its students with a legal method to download music from a catalog of half a million songs, in a departure from punitive efforts to curtail music swapping on college campuses.
The deal between Penn State and the newly revised Napster online service is expected to serve as a model for other universities. It comes as the music industry applies pressure on students and colleges in its antipiracy campaign.
Graham Spanier, the president of Penn State, said it was the first time a college had taken it upon itself to provide music to its students.
"It is unusual," Dr. Spanier said. "But today's college students have told us how important this is to them and with the record industry's new enforcement efforts, we think they'll be very excited to participate."
For some students, the deal may seem as though Prohibition has ended, and drinks are on the house.
The service will allow students to listen to an unlimited number of songs as often as they want. They will be able to download the music to use on three personal computers as long as students are at Penn State. If they want to keep the songs permanently or burn them to a CD, though, they will have to pay 99 cents each.
Dr. Spanier said the university will pay for the Napster service out of the $160 information technology fee students pay each year. The cost to the university is "substantially less" than the $9.95 fee that individual subscribers pay for the Napster service, he said, though he declined to disclose the precise terms.
About 18,000 students in the university's residence halls will be the first to get the service in January, university officials said. By next fall, it is to be made available to all 83,000 undergraduate and graduate students on campuses across the state, as well as faculty and staff.
As huge consumers of music, students have driven the file-sharing epidemic begun in 1999 by Napster, the brainchild of Shawn Fanning, then a college student himself.
Napster went bankrupt after a federal judge ruled in 2001 it had violated copyright laws. It was relaunched last month offering individual songs for 99 cents, albums for $9.95 or monthly subscriptions — for listening only, not copying — for $9.95.
Ian Rosenberger, president of the undergraduate student government at Penn State, said one student he had shown the service thought it was great. But Mr. Rosenberger added that other students were more skeptical of the university's service.
"There's been a lot of attention paid to students as criminals," he said, "and people who download don't see themselves that way."
In the last year the industry has sued several students suspected of illegally trading music over the Internet. Like many colleges, Penn State has used a variety of measures, from mandatory copyright tutorials to suspending Internet access, to try to clamp down. Several colleges use software programs that monitor file-swapping among students, sending e-mail messages warning them they are breaking the law as a first step in imposing penalties.
But university and industry officials hope the Napster carrot will succeed where various sticks have failed in undermining the campus culture of unauthorized copying.
"We have to try every mechanism to see what will be effective," said Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education, which represents colleges and universities. "I fully anticipate many institutions will follow suit, whether with Napster or other services."
Facing demands from the music industry to remove copyrighted files from their networks, several universities began meeting with entertainment industry officials this year to consider how to provide alternatives to making unauthorized copies of music with software like Kazaa.
Dr. Spanier of Penn State and Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, led the committee. The industry blames file-sharing services for a sharp decline in sales in the past three years.
