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Pew also found that among the 35 million adults that its survey indicated download music, 23 million said they did not much care about the copyright on the files they copied onto their computers. Among the 26 million who made files available for others to copy, 17 million did not care much about whether they were copyrighted.

In interviews last week, many file swappers said they were more wary of copying music since the wave of lawsuits was announced. But there was a strong current of defiance, even among those who said they had stopped.

Dr. Steve Vaughan, 35, a Manhattan physician who said he had downloaded about 2,000 songs over the Internet in recent years, said he stopped only because of the "fear factor" after hearing about the lawsuits. He said he might try one of the new legal online music services, though he doubted it would enable him to sample as wide a range of jazz, blues and folk to help him decide what to buy on CD.

Those options may be expanding. In addition to Apple Computer's iTunes and a new legal service called BuyMusic that recently began selling songs online for 99 cents, several competing online music stores are set to open this fall.

"If they give me a full selection, and I could sample what I want and it was well organized, I would love that," Dr. Vaughan said. "I'm not doing this to save money. I'm doing this because the music industry doesn't give me what I want."

At the root of the resistance for many — besides a perhaps decisive fondness for getting things free — is a complaint that the record industry is trying to take away the ability to make copies of music to use personally and to share with friends — a practice that Americans have long enjoyed.

Added to that is a deep-seated resentment of the big record labels, which music fans variously accuse of pricing CD's too high and producing too much bad music.

But Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of communications studies at New York University, said he told his students that distaste for record company practices was not a justification for making unauthorized copies of their music.

"If everyone would cool down the rhetoric we might actually have some helpful discussions," Professor Vaidhyanathan said.

"It would be nice to stop demonizing people who think they're doing reasonable legitimate things in their homes and stop demonizing people who are trying to make a living and recoup an investment," he added.

Society, Mr. Vaidhyanathan added, has to reconcile the desire to make personal copies with the new ability to make millions of perfect copies with the click of a mouse. "Suddenly we have this powerful copying technology in our own homes, and we haven't confronted exactly what it means."

The largest number of respondents to The Times/CBS News poll, 44 percent, said sharing music files over the Internet was sometimes acceptable, if a person shared music from a purchased CD with a limited number of friends or acquaintances. Conducted by telephone on Monday and Tuesday this week among 675 adults, the margin of sampling error in the poll was plus or minus four percentage points.

Lorraine Sullivan, a student at Hunter College in New York, paid $2,500 to the record industry association earlier this week to settle the lawsuit it filed against her. But she said she still saw nothing wrong with her use of file-sharing software. She downloaded Madonna songs that she already had on CD, for instance, so that she could have them on her computer and not have to change CD's while she cleaned her apartment.

"I still feel that if you use downloading to sample a CD or a song and you go buy the CD, it's O.K.," said Ms. Sullivan, who has set up her own Web site asking for donations to help pay her fine.

Fear of being sued or fined can help shape a new moral sensibility — as happened with sexual harassment laws, seat belt requirements and no- smoking laws — despite considerable initial public skepticism. Some legal experts and ethicists say the music industry's enforcement of copyright law against Internet file sharers may eventually catalyze a similar change in attitudes.

But many experts argue that legal prohibition alone is rarely effective in getting people to behave differently if it runs counter to strong societal beliefs.

"When efforts to ban behavior fail, like with the Prohibition, they may need to be changed," said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington.

Several legislators, including Senator Coleman, have called for a re-examination of the notion of "personal copying." Some critics have have suggested that Congress could force the record companies to license their material and find a way to tax Internet users to pay them, essentially legalizing file sharing.

The number of Americans using KaZaA, the leading file-sharing software, from home has dropped about 15 percent since late June, when the record industry announced its plans to sue suspected copyright violators, Nielsen/NetRatings said.

"This slide down over a short period of time coincides with the record industry's effort to lower the boom on its users," said Greg Bloom, a senior analyst with Nielsen. "But there are still a lot of people using these services."

Software like KaZaA, Morpheus, Grokster and iMesh lets Internet users find and retrieve files on one another's computers, rather than from a central Web site. To "share" songs on peer-to-peer networks, users put them into a folder on their computer that they open to others. Others searching for those titles can then download copies onto their PC's.

"The record industry needs to win back the hearts and minds of record buyers, because they can't win a technology war," said Eric Garland, Big Champagne's chief executive.

Meanwhile, many recalcitrant file swappers are simply sizing up the odds: "How many people are they suing?" asked Carlo Lutz, 13, a Bronx High School of Science student, who was listening to rap music he had uploaded to his MP3 player on the subway last Thursday.

"There are millions of us," he added. "It's only a drop in the bucket."

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