Ethics, liability and the possibility of an online coup keep Pepperdine University computer network engineers patrolling the Malibu campus' cyberspace.

If they didn't fight the online surge happening at campuses nationwide, students breaking copyrights to download and share free music and movie files would swallow every gigabyte of the Christian university's computer network, said Kathee Robings, the school's lead computer systems administrator.

The university gets as many as 20 e-mail notices a day from movie studios and recording companies threatening action unless the piracy stops. Network engineers are using what Robings, wary of arming students with too much information, will characterize only as online tools to hunt down file-sharers and change their ways or boot them off the computer system.

And to make sure the message gets to freshmen and other new students who began class on Monday, the consequences of breaking copyright laws were included in campus orientation sessions.

"Instead of just telling them they can't do it, we really want them to understand why they can't do it," Robings said, rattling off reasons such as co-opting the school's educational bandwidth and fleecing struggling artists. "It is stealing. It is absolutely stealing. I don't think it's been presented to students in those terms."

Orientations are when freshmen and other new students begin adjusting to life at a college, learning everything from the whereabouts of classroom buildings to the pitfalls of plagiarism and binge drinking. This year, file sharing has been added to the list at many campuses that have residence dorms where the risk of online transgressions are highest.

Some students say the messages work. Others fixate on neither ethics nor law, but rather on the fact they can get stuff for free.

"It is difficult," said Julius Bianchi, associate provost of informational services at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. "There does seem to be a mentality that a (blank) CD only costs a quarter and why do you have to pay $13. I don't think people make that connection between the cost of the CD and the value of the intellectual property."

California Lutheran administrators used to reserve one of the final sessions in a four-day orientation for computer policies. But hardly anyone would attend. So this year, staff members will hand out information and talk to students during a lunch and job fair on Tuesday, the day before undergraduate classes begin.

Part of the reason for the national campus crackdown is pressure from an entertainment industry that blames file sharing for a 14 percent slump in revenues from CD sales from 1999 to 2002. A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of American also indicted file-sharing as the reason for thousands of layoffs and hundreds of CD music stores going dark.

Industry leaders are focusing on working with universities to shut down illegal file sharing because they understand the obvious.

"You have students with more time than money and you have ready access to a high-speed Internet connection," said Jonathan Lamy, communications director for the RIAA. He characterizes the group's intent to surf sites like Kazaa and Grokster, find people violating copyrights and sue them as a needed stick to enforce the message presented in campus orientations.

Universities serving as Internet service providers are legally obligated to stop instances of pirating uncovered by the RIAA or others and, if requested in a subpoena, to identify the offenders.

The University of California, Santa Barbara, received 63 notices of alleged violations of the file-sharing law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act during the 2001-2002 school year. The following year, the school received more than three times that number with an estimated 200 e-mail complaints, said Kevin Schmidt, campus network programmer.

University staff members respond by posting notices on the outside of a student's dorm room and then terminating the person's network connection while they probe the allegation.

Community colleges and schools without residence dorms aren't having as many problems. But the temptation to share files may increase at California State University, Channel Islands, as the 2-year-old school in Camarillo grows and opens a 350-student dorm next year.

"I think it's already a big concern," said Munawwar Khan, the school's associate vice president of information technology, noting a file-sharing policy is being created. "Until we have a policy in place we can't do much about it."

The thing Stan Bernstein doesn't understand is why universities waited so long.

Last year, Bernstein closed the 33-year-old Morninglory music store he started a few blocks from UC Santa Barbara as a 20-year-old student. Sales had plummeted 70 percent because students were getting their music illegally off the Internet.

"We couldn't compete against free," said Bernstein, who said his two other music stores in Santa Barbara County are also being hurt by file sharing.

He calls the closed store a canary in a coal mine, suggesting its death illustrates a growing disregard for the way entertainment industries make money to support their work. That attitude could lead to fewer choices for people who want new music, new movies and new books.

The reason? Artists won't have incentive.

Some students buy Bernstein's logic and describe file sharing in absolute terms.

"I don't see the gray," said Lori Macdonald, a 47-year-old senior at CSU Channel Islands. "This is, after all, how artists make their money."

Jason Palmer, a senior theater student at Pepperdine University, said he has friends who have stopped file sharing, not just because they might get sued or kicked off the campus network but because of the realization it is wrong.

"I know a lot of students are realizing this year that this is more serious," he said.

But Logan Green, a junior at UC Santa Barbara, contends that if you're smart and careful about downloading music and sharing it, you'll get away with it "every time."

"I think students see it as probably the easiest way to get music, not just the fact that it's free but the fact that you don't have to leave your room," he said.

He concedes file sharing may be technically unethical but notes the music industry isn't exactly perceived by students as a charity they should go out of their way to help.

Explain the saga of the Morninglory store closed by file sharing, and Green expresses empathy. And then he talks of how people selling music have to adapt to a technology that allows people to store their music not in CD bins but in MP3 files on their computers.

"CDs," he said, "are a thing of the past."