espite the lawsuits filed last week against 261 people accused of illicitly distributing music over the Internet, millions of others continue to copy and share songs without paying for them.
Last week, more than four million Americans used KaZaA, the most popular file-sharing software, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, only about 5 percent fewer than the week before the record industry's lawsuits became big news. One smaller service, iMesh, even experienced a slight uptick in users.
The sweeping legal campaign appears to be educating some file swappers who did not think they were breaking the law and scaring some of those who did. But the barrage of lawsuits has also highlighted a stark break between the legal status of file sharing in the United States and the apparent cultural consensus on its morality.
In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this week, only 36 percent of those responding said file swapping was never acceptable. That helps explain why the pop radio hit "Right Thurr," by Chingy, was available to download free from 3.5 million American personal computers last week, while two million file swappers in the United States shared songs from rock icons like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, according to the tracking company Big Champagne.
The persistent lack of guilt over online copying suggests that the record industry's antipiracy campaign, billed as a last-ditch effort to reverse a protracted sales slump, is only the beginning of the difficult process of persuading large numbers of people to buy music again.
Mitch Bainwol, the new chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, which brought the suits, said in an interview that the group had succeeded in communicating that file sharing is illegal and would have consequences. But he acknowledged that shifting attitudes would be the next battle in what he conceded was more an effort to contain file swapping than to wipe it out.
"It's a two-step process," he said. "I don't think anyone has an expectation that file-sharing becomes extinct. What we're trying to drive for is an environment in which legitimate online music can flourish."
The record industry argues that sharing songs online is just like stealing a CD from a record store. But to many Americans, file sharing seems more like taping a song off a radio. The truth, copyright experts say, may lie somewhere between.
And instead of significantly damping enthusiasm for file sharing, the record industry's lawsuits appear to be spurring increasingly sharp debates about how the balance between the rights of copyright holders and those of copyright users should be redefined for a digital age.
"Law, technology and ethics are not in sync right now," said Senator Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican who has called a hearing on the subject for later this month. "I presume these lawsuits are having some impact, but they're not solving the problem."
Soli Shin of Manhattan is not waiting for lawmakers to act. She gave some thought to the ethics of file sharing after hearing of the lawsuits and took her own library of 1,094 songs offline, because she knew they were aimed at people who "share" their music files with others. But she saw no reason to stop getting new music for herself.
"It's really a great convenience," Ms. Shin, 13, said. "If I like what I download maybe I'll buy it."
According to The Times/CBS News poll, adults under 30 are more inclined to consider music sharing over the Internet to be acceptable: 29 percent of them say the practice is acceptable at all times, compared with 9 percent of people older than that.
But the file-sharing trend, which includes many school-age people, has spread across nearly every demographic group, with 27 percent of Internet users between the ages of 30 and 49 involved, according to a survey released in July by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Even 12 percent of those over the age of 50 participate in file sharing, the survey found.
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