Most college students will tell you that work-study funds, server tips, and money from home don’t stretch very far when there are books, food, concert tickets, clothing, and Spring Break vacation packages to buy. Who has money left over to purchase music? Better yet, why buy it when you can download it for free?

If you’re stumped, here are a few reasons why you should acquire your tunes legally:

• Because if you don’t, you’re a thief.
• Because if you don’t, you could potentially be committing a felony.
• Because if you don’t, you could lose your student housing or access to the campus network.
• Because if you don’t, you could spend your last semester of college on house arrest.

If that’s not enough to convince you, maybe this will be:

• Because if you don’t, you could have to cough up more than $3,000 to settle a lawsuit.

Sound harsh or farfetched? Well, it is 100 percent true. Copyright holders and law enforcement are cracking down on what is often called online piracy. A committee in the U.S. House of Representatives has even held hearings to explore the extent of illegal downloading on college campuses and its effects. Closer to home, students at this university have received letters like this one saying that the RIAA is planning to sue them unless they settle out of court.

An online pirate is anyone – young, old, student, working-class professional, retiree – who downloads copyrighted music, movies, games, or software from the Internet without permission and without paying for it. In case you didn’t know, that’s illegal. Why? Because that material is someone’s creative work. Someone owns the work on those files and must give his or her permission before anyone else can use them. If you download a song without paying for it, you’re probably breaking the law unless the artist is offering it on a free trial basis, or unless you are using a free legal service like Ruckus or iTunes. It’s the same as entering a record store, stuffing a CD into your pocket, and walking out the door. That’s just not playing fair.

What, you may ask, if you upload your songs to a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing network so that your friends (or your anonymous online buddies) can copy them for free? It certainly seems convenient – you won’t have to waste your time burning CDs for anyone. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but uploading files, too, is just as unlawful as downloading them (and so is burning copies of your CDs for anyone but yourself, for that matter). The same goes for downloading the latest episode of The Office or burning a bootleg copy of the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie without paying for it. No matter what end of the illegal file sharing process you are on – downloading, uploading, or both – you are putting yourself at risk.

Even if you’re not worried about getting caught, stealing is still stealing, and you know it’s wrong. While it is true that some of your favorite artists are making millions of dollars a year, they spend months or years making CDs for you and the rest of their fans. It’s hardly ethical to go and pirate their hard work just so you can save some cash. Put yourself in their shoes. Suppose you worked for an entire semester on a paper and accidentally left a copy on a computer in the library. How would you feel if months later, you found it floating around on the Internet, where thousands of students were stealing it and passing it off as their own? We’re guessing you probably wouldn’t like it. If that doesn’t hit home, think about the thousands of jobs that may be lost because of online piracy – your goal of becoming a public relations executive, songwriter, sound engineer, or producer in the entertainment industry could remain just a pipe dream if there’s no money to fund these and other positions. Economists already think that piracy is hurting the Los Angeles economy. See? Online piracy can potentially come back to haunt you in ways you hadn’t even considered. Even closer to home, computer slowdowns or damage caused by unwanted adware, malware and spyware may be associated with the use of P2P sites.

So that raises this question - why take the chance of breaking the law? There are so many inexpensive legal music, television show, and movie downloading services at your disposal that there’s no good reason to commit online piracy. Take music, for example. The university has forged a deal with Ruckus to make it available to all undergraduate and graduate students for FREE. Ruckus offers free unlimited tethered downloads to Maryland students on up to two computers. That’s much cheaper than a record store. It also offers discounted pricing on subscription services that allow you to transfer your downloads to CDs and portable music players. There’s a video service available, as well, so you can download and watch your favorite TV shows, movies, and indie films. If Ruckus isn’t right for you, iTunes U will be arriving on campus soon, or you can always give one of the dozens of other legal services a try.

So in short, try clipping coupons or buying your books used…and then put the money you save toward expanding your music or DVD collection. And most importantly, think before you upload or download. After all, it just makes more sense to play fair.