The growing number of college students that have been cited for illegally sharing music on the… The growing number of college students that have been cited for illegally sharing music on the Internet shows that students need to be more informed about their downloading decisions.

Dr. Robert Gilbert’s “Projects in Marketing” class is on a mission to educate Pitt students on the dangers of illegally downloading and burning music from the Internet.

For their semester project, 19 senior Pitt marketing majors have formed a group called Peer to Peer, which informs students about illegally downloading, sharing and burning music on the Internet.

Previous classes have worked on campaigns for Citibank, the Central Intelligence Agency and Chevrolet.

EdVenture Partners has provided the funding to assist their campaign.

Each student was given a job title at the beginning of the semester. Senior Caitlin Martin, for example, is the campaign’s Public Relations Director.

“We’re doing this to help students,” Martin said.

In order to learn more about Pitt students’ habits using and sharing music habits, the class held focus groups and passed out more than 400 surveys, which questioned students on topics such as their use of illegal downloading services and CD burning.

“We wanted to get to know our campus a little better, just in terms of where people are downloading from,” Martin said.

Martin said that through research, the class has learned a lot about how “Spyware” tends to appear on computers after illegally downloading music from the Internet.

The class created a Web site for their group. It contains information such as the pros and cons of downloading and sharing copyrighted music. Links to local bands, legal music downloading alternatives and stories on lawsuits regarding illegal downloading are also included.

Peer to Peer will sponsor a variety of activities for the rest of the semester to create awareness for its cause.

The group will give away a free iPod Nano in early December. Additionally, they will have informational tables and booths promoting legal downloading services. The group will have free T-shirts, downloading cards from various legal downloading services with which they are partnering and other various giveaways.

The group will also speak to classes to inform students of their cause.

Martin emphasized the fact that Pitt is not telling the class to do this.

She said this is “students helping students.”

Martin said the class rated e-Music, Napster and iTunes as the top three legal downloading sources according to their low prices and ease of use.

Penn State has an agreement with Napster that includes the cost of the service in the students’ activities fee, according to the group’s coordinator Nathan Fernando.

Fernando said that the Peer to Peer research department is working to see if Pitt students would want a similar agreement.

“We’ve all started to become really passionate about it and very excited about it,” Fernando said. “We want to try and help people to not get sued.”