After three minutes on his computer, Senior Travis, 21, listens to an illegal version of Floetry's new album, Flo’ology.

The Leisure Studies major obtained the entire Hip Hop and R&B album for free a week before it was released on the file-sharing site BitTorrent.

Travis, along with 35 percent of Internet users, illegally downloads content from the Internet despite threats of fines and imprisonment from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

“As illegal as it may be, it’s hard to trace,” Travis said.

Although two-thirds of college students have no ethical qualms with illegal file sharing, the number of users engaging in the act is steadily decreasing. As more people fear the threat of viruses and prosecution, legal sites such as iTunes and semi-legal BitTorrent have risen in popularity.

BitTorrent has caught the eye of musicians and fans alike for its free and efficient service that allows anyone to publish and share movies, music and software. Users break the law when the content they download is copyrighted.

As an avid BitTorrent user with a growing collection of over 800 music albums in his computer, Travis doesn’t see a downside to what he does.

“Some people say that it hurts the artist, but it doesn’t,” he said. “A signed artist on a major label gets less than $1 per unit sold. All their money comes from ads, endorsements, promoting and concerts.”

In the United States, the RIAA sued nearly 400 people for violating copyright laws. Although the association could have demanded $150,000 per song downloaded, most cases were settled for $2,500 to $7,500.

Downloading copyrighted content from the Internet became illegal in September 2003 when the RIAA began a lawsuit campaign in which they sued everyone from a 12-year-old girl to a 71-year-old grandpa. The scare tactic initialized by the RIAA seemed to work, as the number of downloaders decreased in half by 2004.

Music major Gianpaolo Aguilar, 18, was among the people who backed away from illegal file sharing. The lawsuits made him realize that downloading music wasn’t fair to musicians, especially those just starting off.

“The (content) downloaded are other people’s work, and those people have to live off what profits they get or don’t get,” Aguilar said.

Artists such as the members of Metallica publicly came out denouncing the illegal downloading of their music. The group won a suit against the original and illegal version of Napster for copyright infringement and racketeering. The case ultimately led to the demise of the older Napster.

Other bands, including Thursday and The Decemberists encourage this kind of sharing.

The Indie/Folk Rock group The Decemberists went against the grain and released their new music video, “Sixteen Military Wives” for free on BitTorrent.

The latest version of BitTorrent was released earlier this year with changes that included quicker service, a search tool that allows users to find both legal and illegal files and the elimination of the need for Web site hosting of centralized servers. It is currently the most popular file-sharing tool. With over 45 million users, BitTorrent accommodates 53 percent of all peer-to-peer traffic.

Berkeley resident Bram Cohen developed the ad-supported program at his temporary headquarters in San Francisco. The service was designed to be a search engine that catalogs thousands of movies, music tracks and software programs.

What makes BitTorrent different from its competitors is Cohen’s willingness to work with the Motion Picture Association and the RIAA. Unlike illegal sites such as Kazaa, Limewire and Morpheus, BitTorrent advertises the legal sharing of original content.

The focus of the service is to allow anyone to publish large files without the downfall of high costs for increasing bandwidth. The more popular a file becomes, the faster it can be downloaded because users contribute in the distribution process.

The more people seeding, or sharing a file, the faster the download, Travis said. BitTorrent doesn’t host any files on its website, it just provides torrents (information) that give links to users who have the files stored on their computers.

While many are happy with BitTorrent, Design and Industry Senior Tony Wodarck, 21, found the program to be “too good,” and stopped using it because he ended up exhausting all of the available free space on his computer.

Those who remain wary of BitTorrent have plenty of legal and payable options, including iTunes, Napster 2.0, Musicmatch Jukebox and even Walmart.com. On average, a single song costs $.99 to download while an album is about $9.99.

“With iTunes being so readily available, I’d rather just download from there,” said Psychology Junior Becky Hollman, 20. “It’s really cheap and easy and I know I’m not going to get a virus.”