Newly reopened Napster.com announced a deal this week with Penn State University to allow students connected with the university network free streaming and free, limited downloads of digital music.

Administrators at Penn State said they hope this will help curtail the amount of illegal file sharing among students.

Although Iowa State has had its own problems with illegal downloading, Mike Bowman, assistant director of Academic Information Technologies at Iowa State, said he didn’t expect Iowa State to be entertaining any deals of this kind presently. The opportunity for users to download music legally was relatively new, Bowman said.

Mike Banasiak, president of the Government of the Student Body, said the deal between Penn State and Napster might be something Iowa State should keep in mind for the future.

“I certainly think it would be something to look into, since file sharing is an issue that has become more and more visible on campus lately,” said Banasiak, junior in management. “I don’t know if that would solve the whole problem, but it would be more toward a compromise.”

Banasiak said he has used the Internet to download illegal copyright materials in the past.

“As a college student with limited monetary resources, it’s hard to go out and spend $20 on a new CD,” he said.

Penn State’s arrangement, which is to begin in January, does not waive the costs of burning the music to discs, but does allow for the sharing of Napster’s library of 500,000 songs. The cost of the program is planned to be paid for with student technology fees.

Both members of the recording industry and Penn State officials hope offering this service will help curb illegal file-sharing by students, who are widely regarded as the most frequent violators of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.

“This will be the first step in a new, legal approach designed to meet student interest in getting extensive digital access to music,” Penn State President Graham Spanier said of the program.

Spanier has not yet said what the cost to the university will be for the deal and has declined to say how long the contract with Napster will run, only saying the first semester of the program’s use will act as an “experimental period.”

Iowa State’s problems with illegal file sharing have been widespread, Bowman said. He estimated about 25 violation notices are passed through his department each month.

“We take it very seriously,” Bowman said. “I think it’s the same at other universities.”

Bowman’s office deals with the notices. Its job is to legitimize the complaint and locate the student involved before turning the matter over to the Dean of Students, he said.

A first offense usually results in little more than the violator being asked to take shared material down from the site and away from access by other users. Second offenses are turned over to the Dean of Students office to go through a student judicial process.

“There aren’t many repeat offenders,” Bowman said.

Doug Jacobson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, said intervention from the administration is usually motivated by notices from the DMCA.

“They only react when a notice comes in,” Jacobson said. “They don’t do any active monitoring of the information that passes through the pipeline.”

The university sees itself as an Internet provider, which is not responsible for monitoring the data that flows through the ISU computer network, Jacobson said. Instead, the university is responsible for maintaining the system that provides service to computers on campus or university-owned property.

“We don’t want to head down that slippery slope of what’s considered good and bad data,” Jacobson said.

“They don’t look at the content of the pipe unless in cases of attack patterns, like some of the more vicious worms we’ve been seeing lately. Iowa State takes the position that it will provide the pipeline, and the data is the responsibility of the user.”

— The Associated Press contributed to this article.