Virginia Tech announced its adoption of the iTunes on Campus program, joining a group of universities taking the first step to stem the illegal downloading of music by students who want to listen to music at the time and place of their choice.

"Virginia Tech's use of iTunes will allow students to download songs legally but will also assist faculty members who may use music in their curricula," said John Krallman, Virginia Tech's director of Information Technology Acquisitions. "At no cost to the university, electronic distribution of the Apple software will be available to current faculty, staff, and students for the fall semester."

Such partnerships have emerged, in part, to respond to the national issue of copyright infringement when music, photographs and other electronic information is downloaded from the Internet. In recent months, for example, Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed several lawsuits targeted at those who download music illegally.

iTunes offers an extensive music library of more than 700,000 songs for Mac and PC customers to legally discover, purchase, and download music online. The iTunes Music Store gives users the ability to play songs on up to five personal computers, burn a song onto CDs an unlimited number of times, burn the same play list up to seven times, and listen to their music on an unlimited number of iPods.

"There is competing software on the market, but to date, no one else has approached us with this type of agreement," Krallman said. "The university is open to offering additional solutions for our students."

Founded in 1872 as a land-grant college, Virginia Tech has grown to become among the largest universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Today, Virginia Tech's eight colleges are dedicated to putting knowledge to work through teaching, research, and outreach activities and to fulfilling its vision to be among the top 30 research universities in the nation. At its 2,600-acre main campus located in Blacksburg and other campus centers in Northern Virginia, Southwest Virginia, Hampton Roads, Richmond, and Roanoke, Virginia Tech enrolls more than 28,000 full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries in 180 academic degree programs.

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