College students are coming under legal fire in the ongoing debate over file swapping.

Many students complain that the price for a CD is too high, and instead choose to download or copy music from friends.

Despite their complaints, the Recording Industry Association of America filed lawsuits starting Sept. 8 against nearly 300 file sharers. That number pales when compared to the estimated 60 million users who regularly download music and movie files from file-sharing programs such as KaZaA and Morpheus.

According to the RIAA, university students make up a large portion of those who illegally copy music files. Some schools have taken measures to prevent their students from downloading illegal files, even restricting Internet bandwidths in on-campus facilities.

Loyola’s official online use policy has existed relatively unaltered since its adoption when the campus-wide network was created in 1998, according to Bret Jacobs, the executive director for Loyola’s Information Technology Department.

Jacobs said that the purpose of controlling bandwidth is not only to prevent large files such as movies from being downloaded, but also to keep the network running smoothly.

The policy is reviewed annually by a committee with members from IT, the Student Government Association, Student Affairs and Risk Management.

SGA president Bea Forlano said she thinks most students are unaware of Loyola’s policy.

“Most students aren’t concerned until it happens to someone they know,” Forlano said.

The university regularly receives small numbers of infringement notices against specific students from both the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America, according to Jacobs. The groups monitor file swappers with an excess of 1,000 shared documents and then subpoena Internet service providers for the users’ names. Jacobs said that the notices are passed along to the students, but that Loyola has not taken any direct action against the alleged violators.

The popularity of downloading music for free has taken a toll at the local level, on New Orleans’ music industry.

Harris Rea, owner of Red Hot Records in New Orleans, said that in the three decades he has been in the business he has never had as hard a time as the past two years.

“It’s a terrible depression we’re in,” he said. “So many people have lost their jobs in the industry.”

Nearly 800 chain stores such as Wherehouse Music have been forced to shut down due to the increasing use of piracy. Rea attributes about

300 lost jobs lost in New Orleans to the suffering entertainment economy.

Racoon Records of Lafayette, which had survived for 28 years, was just one of many local music shops that closed this year.

The storeowners told Rea that people would come to purchase a record, and a friend would tell them at the counter, “‘Don’t pay for that, I’ll just burn you a copy.”‘

Music business sophomore Tom Gelini said he’s aware that downloading means lost revenue for musicians.

“It’s bad for business,” he said, “but I’ll take what I can get for free.”

Classical studies senior Colin Williams said he refrains from downloading music, but he doesn’t condemn people who do.

“It doesn’t concern me that people aren’t holding themselves to as high a standard. What concerns me is that they think they’re entitled to download, that it’s perfectly right to download something.”

Rea said burning for personal use is legal, but uploading and downloading are not. Entertainment exports were the leading industry for the United States in recent years.

“It’s the only industry historically that has never had a negative trade balance,” Rea said, “and file sharing and piracy threaten that. I released 40 records a year in the late ’90s. I’ve only released three this year.”

It’s a ripple effect, according to Rea. If the record companies can’t make the money they need, musicians will have less chance of breaking out.

When asked whether he has ever downloaded music for himself, Rea said he didn’t even know how to download.

“That would be like shaking hands with the devil,” he said.

Williams agreed that he would rather pay for a CD than download a song.

“Really, music is a luxury, and if I can’t afford it, I’ll do without it. If I can afford, I’ll pay the piper,” he said.