Downloading music over the Internet is pretty common among high school and college students. However, when students download and share copyrighted music without permission, they are against the law.   A survey of young people's music ownership has found that teenagers and college students have an average of more than 800 illegally copied songs each on their digital music players.Half of those surveyed share all the music on their hard drive  , enabling others to copy hundreds of songs at any one time. Some students were found to have randomly linked their personal blogs to music sites, so as to allow free trial listening of copyrighted songs for blog visitors, or adopted some of the songs as the background music for their blogs. Such practices may be easy and free, but there are consequences.   Sandra Dowd, a student of Central Michigan University, was fined US$7,500 for downloading 501 files from LimeWire, a peer-to-peer file sharing program. Sandra claimed that she was unaware that her downloads were illegal until she was contacted by authorities. Similarly, Mike Lewinski paid US$4,000 to settle a lawsuit against him for copyright violation  . Mike expressed shock and couldn't believe that this was happening to him. "I just wanted to save some money and I always thought the threat was just a scare tactic ." "You know, everyone does it," added Mike.   The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), the organization that files lawsuits against illegal downloaders, states that suing   students was by no means their first choice. Unfortunately, without the threat of consequences, students are just not changing their behavior. Education alone is not enough to stop the extraordinary growth of the illegal downloading practice. Why is it common for students to download copyrighted music?
They don't think that they will be caught. They want their friends to know that they are smart. They think it is a good way to make some extra money. They are against copyright protection over Internet music.