Colleges crack down on piracy

According to a report filed by a coalition of higher education institutions and the recording industry, colleges and universities are taking steps to decrease occurrences of illegally downloaded music on their campuses.

Plans include better access to legal music downloads, education on downloading music from the Internet and stiffening penalties for those who do download illegally. In some universities students will pay for access to legal downloading sites such as Napster as part of their university technology fee.

"We're delighted to see the kind of experimentation going on in the university community," Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), told The Washington Post.

And the experiments seem to be working.

Penn Sate implemented such a program last spring. So far, students have legally downloaded more than 100,000 songs per day from Napster while illegal downloading has diminished.

"I think if we tried to take it away at this point there would be quite a rebellion," Penn State President Graham Spanier told Reuters.