By offering free high-speed Internet access to their students and employees, college campuses opened the door to illegal downloading -- now they're struggling to slam it shut.

Allowing students to tap into their networks has become the norm at colleges, both as an academic courtesy and as a selling point for on-campus housing. With large, tech-savvy populations, they became early hotbeds of file-sharing, as students traded their favorite tracks and movies in the dorms and through campus computer centers.

Now, as pressure on downloaders grows from the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued 261 people Monday in federal court, colleges are trying to limit the practice.

"The dorms are the craziest," said Darryl Thompson, a fourth-year English student at the University of California, Los Angeles. "It takes less than a second to get a song, so that's where it all goes on. ... Students don't have a lot of cash and they like music. That's what all the culture revolves around, and if you can get something for free, you can always take advantage of it."

The RIAA has pressured universities nationwide to keep students from using on-campus networks to download, and now UCLA has warned students to refrain. In a statement, the university said it will not protect students accused of copyright infringement and that offenders can be disciplined.

California State University, Northridge, has taken the most extreme measures, installing a firewall and identifying all its on-campus computer locations. Now, its students and employees can't share files and if Steve Fitzgerald, CSUN's chief technology officer, receives word that they're downloading, he can boot them off the network.

"We were getting pummeled by notices from the RIAA and the (Motion Picture Association of America) that we were doing something wrong," Fitzgerald said. "Now, it's just a trickle."

At the Valencia-based California Institute for the Arts, network administrators have limited the amount of bandwidth students can use for downloading, an approach also favored by Pepperdine University and California Lutheran University. In spite of the efforts, all have continued problems with unauthorized downloads. Though students receive a lecture about the issue's legalities, CalArts' acting dean of the division of library and information resources Susan Lowenberg said she still gets notices from industry groups alleging copyright infringement.

"I think students don't get it," she said. "They don't understand they're stealing someone else's intellectual property. We've tried to inform them, but it's just pervasive."

Though most students admit to pirating a track here and there, not all indulge with the same frequency. A former downloader, Megan Lagerson, gave up after Napster's original incarnation shut down. The CSUN freshman child development major buys a few CDs each month, but downloading doesn't interest her anymore.

"I could, but they're putting the music out, so you should pay for it," she said. "Even when I was downloading, I still bought."

Though he admits to using file sharing to download live versions of songs unavailable on discs, Abel Rubalcava, also of CSUN, refuses to download albums. A music collector with 500 CDs in his own library, he also works as a clerk for Latin music publisher Jam Entertainment, giving him a distinct view of the financial impact of downloading.

"That's what we live off, and so many royalties are getting stolen each year," said the Panorama City native, a senior in cinema, television and film. "All my friends do it -- I'm probably the only one who doesn't. I tell them not to, but they don't listen."

Though many students are unafraid of being caught, Derrick Chiang, a fifth-year economics major at UCLA, said his downloading days are over. He lives off-campus now after taking time off to try his luck in the dot-com world, but remembers using nascent networks in the mid-1990s to build up his library.

"The value I get out of it isn't worth the risk," said Chiang, who also dabbles in Web consulting. "But that's because I run a business and my Internet connection's through there. If I were in the dorms, it would be a different story. I wouldn't give a damn."