It's Friday afternoon and the freshmen of Tercero Hall at the University of California at Davis are doing what college students have done for generations. Music fills the air, doors are open, and dorm mates drift from room to room making plans for the evening. Yet for all its familiarity, a walk down Tercero's hallway is a journey into a new world. This is the first generation of Americans raised on computers and the freewheeling ways of the Internet. And the Babel of music echoing down the concrete corridor is not from personal CDs but from digital downloads off the Web.
Students watch a film taken from the Internet.
By doing so, however, these students are also players in a battle over copyright laws, which like many of the old rules governing commerce are being tested and rewritten by the digital age. Students here were warned recently about possible copyright-law violations in using Napster. And the practice has become so popular across the country that scores of universities have taken steps to block or impede students' access to Napster, not so much for legal reasons but simply because its heavy use is bogging down their computer networks and disrupting normal academic use. A court hearing is expected later this month. There is undoubtedly a whiff of rebellion in students' rush to get free music from Napster.