LEWISTON – Five Bates College students have been told to either settle out of court with the recording industry or face being sued for illegally sharing music online.

If they are sued, penalties could be $750 or higher for each pirated song.

The Lewiston college, which has not released the names of the students, received the ultimatum as part a wave of letters sent Wednesday to 22 universities from the Recording Industry Association of America.

Two previous waves of letters sent in late February and March included five University of Maine System campuses. The new batch includes Colby College in Waterville.

“The recording industry is getting awfully good at finding people who are downloading their music,” said Gene Wiemers, Bates’ vice president for information and library services.

That’s part of the message Wiemers and the school sent to all students when the record industry sent out a warning to Bates in late March.

“You are not anonymous on the Internet,” Wiemers wrote in his warning. “If you are engaging in illegal file sharing, you should stop.”

Anonymity, however, is relative.

The record industry doesn’t know the identity of the targeted students. It has simply traced Internet service provider addresses and times back to the school. It is asking the school to trace those back to the individual students, which it can in most cases.

Bates forwarded the letters to the five targeted students, who have 20 days to settle up. If they chose not to, the school will face a choice of its own.

If any of Bates’ students have not settled with the record industry group, the school will be served with a subpoena demanding the identities.

It’s uncertain whether the school will give them up.

“We will decide what to do when the time comes, Wiemers said.

If the students chose to settle, the students may call a record industry phone number or a specially created Web site, www.p2plawsuits.com. The site allows people to plug in a case number and pay damages with a credit card. They must also agree to stop moving files illegally.

The bill would be much smaller than any damages determined in court, said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America.

“It’s confidential,” Lamy said, “But it’s far less than the law allows.”

The pre-litigation letters are meant to remedy each case “before it even becomes a case,” he said.

It’s unlikely to stop the piracy, Bates students said Thursday.

“Students will find a way,” said Pat O’Brien, a sophomore. He also worries little for the most successful artists, who argue that illegal downloading is theft.

“The big artists seem to be doing all right,” he said, pointing to such shows as MTV’s “Cribs,” which show off stars’ glamorous homes.

However, as a lawful subscriber of iTunes, O’Brien said piracy would be too much of a hassle.

“For $1 a song, it’s worth it,” he said. “It will cost you more if you get in trouble.”

Wiemers hopes the message gets out. In all, the school provides 5,000 Internet accounts to its students, faculty and staff, he said.

This is only the most recent sign that the industry is getting tougher on illegal file sharing and downloading.

Before this batch of letters, the school had been served many times with warnings from music and movie companies over illegal practices, Wiemers said

The warnings began arriving about five years ago, but they were rare. The school even went more than a year between them.

That changed last fall, when about 10 per month began arriving.

In most cases, the offending students were asked to stop and they complied. If they continued, they were unplugged from the campus network.

The school has also made its Internet service more difficult to use for sharing files. Since most use so-called “peer-to-peer” protocols, Bates technicians have reduced the bandwidth for such applications, like turning a faucet to a trickle.

However, the school continues to boast a wide pipe to the Internet for its lawful students.

“Right now, students are taking their finals,” Wiemers said. They need to have access to lots of information, including streaming audio and video, for their work.

The school is committed to keeping the data stream strong, he said.