More than 3,000 students at Pennsylvania State University's University Park campus signed up for a legal music-sharing service in the first 24 hours after it was made available, free, on the campus network, university officials said on Tuesday.

The university has purchased a campuswide subscription to the service, Napster 2.0, which is the revived version of the once-popular online file-sharing service. Napster 2.0 is the centerpiece of the university's much-ballyhooed plan to fight music piracy on its computer networks. As its spring semester started on Monday, Penn State allowed some 17,000 students to join the service and start downloading music from its archives.

Under the terms of the university's deal with Napster -- announced by Penn State officials in November (The Chronicle, November 21, 2003) -- students will pay nothing listen to streaming audio of any of the 500,000 songs in the Napster library, or to download the songs to their computers for the duration of their subscriptions to the music service. They will pay 99 cents a song to put music on a compact disk or transfer it to a portable MP3 player. The university would not disclose how much it paid for the contract.

As of Tuesday, the 3,000 participating students had streamed or downloaded about 100,000 songs, according to Russell S. Vaught, Penn State's assistant vice provost for information technology. The service is available only to PC users who live in the university's residence halls.

Already, university officials are heralding the program as a success, citing the number of students who used the service and a fairly smooth technical transition. More than 100 students had difficulty registering with Napster, but technology officers were able to handle the problems within a day, according to Mr. Vaught. Fears that a frenzy of downloading activity would cripple the university's computer network did not come to pass, he said.

The university hopes to convince students that industry-sanctioned file-sharing programs now present a viable alternative to underground music-swapping. "The hope is that this will change students' attitudes towards file-sharing," said Mr. Vaught, "so that when they get out of college they'll continue to use legal services."

Penn State signed an 18-month contract with Napster, and plans to offer the service to nonresidential students and to faculty members by the beginning of the fall semester. The service will also be offered on the university's other campuses. Penn State enrolls a total of 83,000 students.

But officials are quick to point out that the deal is a trial program. The university will gather student feedback over the spring semester and consider making improvements to the program over the summer.

The success of the program could help other institutions consider the merits of similar endeavors, according to Graham B. Spanier, the president of the university, who serves with representatives of the recording and movie industries and other colleges on a committee that analyzed colleges' potential responses to illegal file sharing. "This will be a good experiment for colleges to look at because we are working through the early stages of making legal music massively available," he said.

But some college officials worry that deals like Penn State's arrangement with Napster could monopolize the time and resources of campus technology officers without mitigating the threat of further legal action from the Recording Industry Association of America.

"It's not clear to me that we as a university want to become a middleman for providing music," said Gregory Jackson, chief information officer at the University of Chicago. "Making something like this work is a daunting technical problem, and if I'm spending money on this, I'm not spending money on any number of other important things."

Legal file-trading programs might not even prevent students from resorting to music piracy, according to Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has opposed the recording industry in file-sharing debates and in court. Mr. von Lohmann said recording-company executives could still conceivably sue Penn State if they felt the university was not working hard enough to stop illegal song-swapping on the campus network.

"I think this is the wrong approach," he said of the Penn State program. "They're paying all this money, and they haven't actually bought themselves out of the legal problems."