A sort of "free Napster" movement is surfacing to counter efforts by record companies and universities to quash access to the software, which lets online users swap digital music tracks.

The Recording Industry Association of America_s (RIAA) beef with Napster is that it could create a black market for illegal copies of digital music; the organization is suing to shut Napster down. Universities, on the other hand, started barring students--arguably the most active digital music collectors--from using college networks to tap Napster on the grounds that the program was a bandwidth hog. Although the young Napster still has to square off with the RIAA in court, students at Oregon State University, Northwestern, Oxford, the University of California at San Diego, and other campuses that have banned Napster may have found a way to beat the system. Stanford University senior David Weekly, who irked the software maker when he published online instructions on how the company_s system works, has now posted a tutorial for students that teaches them how to get around their colleges_ roadblocks to Napster. Weekly_s plan will only be helpful to those running Linux and Unix operating systems, but Mac and Windows users can get around the blocks, too, he said. Students must take only a few steps to gain access to a proxy server outside of their universities, which a friend at another school can help them access. Then the banned students can use the remote server as a middleman for getting into Napster.