One university has taken a different approach to stopping the illegal downloading of music.

It is making it legal.

Pennsylvania State University has recently signed a deal with Napster allowing students to stream music for free. There is a $9.99 charge for the service, but the fee is accounted for in the technology fee the students already pay.

Bill Mahon, assistant vice president for university relations at PSU, said the fee will not make the technology fee rise, either.

He said the idea for the alliance came from University President Graham Spanier. Because of the idea, Napster set up a “great” deal with the university to give students the access.

“We’re apparently the first school to do this,” Mahon said.

He said the deal was so great he wasn’t allowed to talk about it.

So far, the university has just been running tests of the new deal with small groups of students, and Mahon said the feedback from the students trying it has been positive.

Come January, PSU will start its pilot study on the students in the residence halls. The service will be available to all residence hall students at the 24 campuses across the state. Mahon said is around 17,000 students who will have access.

“If everything works out positively, we hope to have it available to all Penn State students in the fall of 2004,” he said.

Unfortunately for the students, though, they do not get to keep the music. Mahon said it is basically renting it. If the student wants to burn a song to a CD, they have to pay an extra fee.

He anticipates the debut of the alliance to start a trend through the other institutes of higher learning in the country.

“It’ll probably start to become a pretty regular service at a lot of colleges and universities in the future,” Mahon said.

Yuki Morikawa, exchange student at Missouri Southern, said she would like to see something like this happen at Southern. She thinks it would be better for the students, because they could download more easily and safely.

“It’s better to be legal,” Morikawa said.

Doug Carnahan, dean of students, said the idea might be something the University will look into at some point.

“If that’s something that becomes a trend in colleges and universities across the country, that’s definitely something we would have to look into,” Carnahan said.

Steve Earney, assistant vice president for information services, said there are problems with students downloading music in the residence halls. He said that anytime a student downloads, they are also uploading at the same time. This uses a lot of the bandwidth the University has. He said recently one student was using up 8/10 of the University’s bandwidths.

“He just thought he was downloading, but really he was uploading to the world,” Earney said.

He said the idea is also something he thinks the University could consider at some point in time.

Carnahan said it is definitely not something that will happen in the near future.

“It wouldn’t happen overnight,” he said.