VALLEY CITY, N.D. (AP) - Figuring students will somehow find a way to download music, Valley City State decided to help them do it legally.

The university is offering Ruckus Network, a service that allows students to use their university e-mail addresses to download music.

"We might as well make it easy and convenient for them," campus spokesman Joe Tykwinski said.

The service costs the campus nothing and has reduced the number of notices from the recording industry about illegal file sharing, he said.

Valley City State provides all students with laptops, Tykwinski said, and the service allows students to download songs for free and play them on their laptops. The songs cannot be burned to a CD or transferred to an MP3 player without paying a fee.

Valley City State is the only campus in the state to offer Ruckus, Tykwinski said.

Kristine Holm, Valley City State's student body president, has downloaded more than 3,000 songs using Ruckus. She said students want to avoid a lawsuit from the recording industry.

North Dakota college students have been threatened with lawsuits from the Recording Industry Association of America for illegal downloads. Settlements from the national crackdown on illegal file sharing on college campuses have averaged in the thousands of dollars.

"Students are pretty fearful of that lawsuit," Holm said.

About 500 of the university's roughly 1,000 students have used the Ruckus service so far this fall to download more than 120,000 songs, Tykwinski said.

Junior Greg Innocent said one downside is that students cannot transfer songs to their iPods.

"When you have to travel, you kinda wish you could take it with you," Innocent said.

Anne Miedema, who graduated in May from Valley City State and used Ruckus during a test period last spring, said she was unable to find some older songs through the service.

"But it doesn't really bother me because I'm not going to go to jail," said Miedema, who now works as an administrative assistant on campus.