Every wired student at Penn State who checked his or her e-mail this week shared a quick lesson in copyright law.

Users afraid of outright bans and prying Net-keepers read what they want, but the nasty Napster memo didn’t amount to much more than a friendly reminder.

In case we’ve all been distracted by fear of an impending ban on the widely used file-sharing program, trading copyrighted music without consent from the artist or owner has been pretty much illegal from the beginning of this Web-age dispute.

While critics are free to contest the creative merits and lasting power of the latest pop single, that three-minute clip of recorded sound ultimately remains the artist’s, or record label’s, intellectual property.

It’s a phrase that sounds better affixed to scholarly papers, thick textbooks and works of performance art.

When presented before the law, though, an MP3 ripped from a mass-produced compact disc is just as worthy of protection as a new poem torn from an anthology.

Sometimes it seems we have less sympathy for millionaire rock stars when they gripe about ebbing record sales. But picking favorites doesn’t always qualify as civil disobedience or fighting corporate monopoly.

At what point do artists become famous or successful enough that we no longer have to pay for their art?

A university, among other things, is a community of intellectuals, whose ideas are usually their most valuable products.

Plagiarism, an offense not far removed from copyright infringement, has long been accepted as an anathema here.

With the advent of personal computers, restrictions on plagiarism were appropriately extended to include ideas that may only exist as characters on a screen and bytes on a hard drive.

It’s time to do the same for copyrighted multimedia content.

All these expectations are, of course, rather idealistic in an environment where free or low-cost entertainment is sometimes the only option for cash-strapped students.

Each person with a Penn State access account can still decide whether or not to break the rules. Indeed, many who trade illegal files will elude scrutiny and suspicion, let alone punishment.

Big Brother isn’t hacking into our private folders: The university does not peek at what we’re doing specifically or what files we have saved.

Penn State administrators merely monitor network traffic and notice when certain computers hog the bandwidth. This policy represents the same level of access all Internet service providers can exercise.

Getting caught has not become much more likely, but maybe the mass e-mail will make some students think longer about the value of ideas, text and art as commodities in our fast-paced, soundbite-laced society. The university was right to contribute its stance to the discussion.