More colleges are offering legal alternatives to combat music piracy on campus.

Pennsylvania State University was the first university to offer a legal music service to students last year. The pilot program was offered to 17,000 students in residence halls, and about 85 percent of them used the program, according to Tysen Kendig, manager of the news bureau at Penn State. This year it is open to all of Penn's 83,000 students, he said.

"Students have told us that music is an important part of their lives, and Penn State is really making a push to become a more student-centered university," he said.

Kendig said the program, in addition to providing students with the music they want, also educates them in copyright law and ethics. He said the biggest problem with copyright music is that students think free music is their birthright.

"It's a mindset that we need to work hard to overcome, that it's stealing and that it's wrong," Kendig said.

Penn has teamed up with now-legal Napster to provide students with free access to the over 600,000 songs in Napster's database. The students can download songs and stream audio. To burn a song to a CD or MP3 player, they pay 99 cents a track. The university is paying for this service in a closed contract with Napster.

"Basically Napster is giving it to us for so cheap they don't want anyone to know about it," Kendig said.

Although it is a little early to tell, Kendig said he expects about 85 percent of the students to sign up for the service, as the pilot group did last year.

This fall, more U.S. colleges and universities have begun to offer legal music downloads to their students.

The University of Minnesota is one such school. It has signed a one-year trial contract with RealNetworks, in which the university directs students to the RealNetworks site through its e-commerce page. The university pays nothing to provide this service.

"You want to take advantage of this, you pay. (If) you don't want to take advantage of this, you don't pay," said Shih-Pau Yen, deputy chief information officer at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus.

Yen said the university wanted to provide a service — similar to food and television — in the dorms.

If the students decide to subscribe to RealNetworks, they get discounted deals on the music. Normally $9.95 a month, students can subscribe for $2.99 a month, $5.99 for three months or $23.99 for the entire year. To download songs, users pay the discounted promotional rate of 49 cents per song until November, when they will pay 79 cents a song.

Classes began last week at UMTC, but 500 to 600 students have already signed up with RealNetworks, according to Yen.

"Most people like it," Yen said.

At Marquette, there are currently no university programs that provide free and legal access to music.

Last spring the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America contacted Marquette about illegal downloading occurring on campus.

"In that case, the university was served with a subpoena to provide names associated with certain IP addresses, which we did, as we're required to by law," said Brigid O'Brien, director of university communication. "Any of this is illegal and violates our acceptable use policy."

Although three Marquette students were involved in the lawsuit, only one student was determined to be at fault. The university is no longer involved with the case, and hasn't been contacted about illegal downloading since.