By SARAH BROACH

Staff Writer

It has been more than four years since Napster was shut down for illegally providing copyrighted music, but people are continuing to download music, and college students are the prime targets for lawsuits.

In early October, a judge gave the Recording Industry Association of America permission to receive the identity of a Louisiana State University student who downloaded nine songs.

Danny Schales, network administrator, said the Computing Center at Tech sometimes receives notices from the RIAA, but the university has never been subpoenaed.

"We periodically get notices from the RIAA or other software associations with requests that we have somebody remove something," Schales said.

"We track who the computer belongs to and notify the user about the notice, and we always get a positive response from people."

In June 2003, the RIAA announced it would begin filing lawsuits against individual distributors of copyrighted music over the Internet.

Since then, many college students who have shared music over their universities' networks have been sued by the RIAA.

Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, said in a statement in April that college students are the main offenders of the copyright laws.

"Our research shows that many university students are still under the impression that taking the songs for free from the Internet is OK," Sherman said. "Hopefully, the lawsuits will clarify the situation."

Tim Atkins, a junior construction engineering technology major, said he understands why the RIAA has no reservation about suing students.

"If I was the one suing, I wouldn't care who I was targeting," Atkins said. "It's wrong either way."

Atkins said he owns a few burned compact discs but feels people should just borrow music from someone they know, rather than download it illegally.

"I won't say I'm totally against it, but it's wrong," Atkins said. "That's a person's livelihood -- how they make their living."

Cade Pellegrin, a freshman electrical engineering major, said he thinks downloading music is OK if it is just to check out a band for the first time.

"To an extent it's not wrong if you want to hear something from a certain band without buying their music to see if you like them," Pellegrin said.

"But if you're downloading many songs of one band, and it's past the stage of just seeing whether or not you like it, I think that's wrong."

Schales said the bandwidth restrictions limit how quickly students can download files, which prevents them from downloading multiple music files efficiently.

Schales said, "You have to realize that you're violating copyright laws if you're [downloading songs], so it's not something we advocate."