Students living in dorms with fast network connections find themselves able to download music off the Internet at a time when swapping MP3s comes under fire in the courts.

Resumption of dorm life at Penn State means speedy access to the network and leaves students scrambling to download music off the Internet.

The speed of Penn State's network server and Ethernet cards, compared to that of a modem phone connection, is an incentive for students to download music in a short period of time.

Mike Devine (junior-education) said he used Napster, a site offering downloadable music, as soon as his computer was hooked up to the faster network server in his dorm.

Napster is one of many services on the Internet that allows computer users to swap and download songs for free by trading MP3 files, a compression format that turns music on CDs into small computer files.

With a network server, Michael Waltman (sophomore-English) said he could download a song in about four minutes.

"A high speed connection is a must," he added.

Although students in dorms have speedy connections, the convenience of Napster might not be around for long.

Stemming from a suit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a federal appeals court in July granted Napster a last-minute reprieve, staying a judge's injunction order against the service.

The prospect of Napster being shut down does not deter students from downloading MP3s from the Internet.

"Even if Napster is closed, three or four sites will take its place," Casey De Santis (junior-logistics) said.

In the event Napster should finally be closed to users, some students might be disappointed with the services offered by other MP3 sites.

"I'm sure another program will come out and I'll be able to use something else, but I like how easy Napster is. I can always find everything I need," Shawn Sweeney (junior-mathematics) said.

Sweeney said he uses Napster often because he is able to find music there that he can't find anywhere else or wouldn't normally listen to.

Compared to the amount of publicity Napster has received in its case against the RIAA, some similar sites might be over looked by students.

"They are hard to find and not as high of quality," John Lust (freshman-political science) said.

Other sites might lack the name recognition and the number of available songs that Napster has accumulated.

Before students begin downloading music for the first time or searching for an alternative source for MP3s, they must first decide whether they feel swapping downloadable MP3s is right or wrong.

Waltman said he knows that stealing music is wrong and Lust said he understood why musicians and music companies would be upset if their form of income were threatened.

Other students are confident that using convenient services such as Napster is right and will continue to use them.

"A lot of the songs I download I have on CD, so I've already bought the rights to it, so why shouldn't I download it," Devine said.

Some students are not threatened by the events from the case against Napster and will continue to use its services and those offered by other sites.

"In my opinion, they're getting too worked up about it all. I'm not worried about being tracked or anything, they can't stop me from using it. I know I'll keep using it and so will my roommates," Sal Zagarella (senior-industrial engineering) said.

Sweeney said he is not worried about the possible consequences from downloading music.

"I'm not worried about getting in trouble. There are too many users. The company's just wasting its time going after the little guys instead of the big guys," Sweeney said. "I am disappointed because I get all my music off the Internet. I don't buy CDs."