Blackbeard and Captain Kidd were pirates. A handful of Bates College students, guilty of allegedly facilitating the illegal sharing of copyrighted materials, not so much.

In the opinion of the Recording Industry Association of America, however, they seem equal. Five student scalawags from the Lewiston college are under RIAA scrutiny for sharing pirated material, and were threatened this week with copyright infringement lawsuits unless agreeing to settle.

It’s a strange industry that sues its customers, especially for limited results. To date, about 116 students have settled with the RIAA from litigation notices like those issued to Bates, an infinitesimal number given the pervasiveness of the problem. The RIAA says half of all American college students download illegally.

Other universities, much larger than Bates, have received thousands of notices, and tried to bill the RIAA for pursuing alleged offenders. Some flung their hands in the air and said their technology won’t allow such sleuthing. Many colleges just sigh, and pass the notices along to the accused.

It appears to be all saber-rattling by the RIAA at Internet pirates, anyway. A punitive approach cannot possibly reverse the eight-year-old file sharing movement, which was born in a Northeastern University dormitory room by a wunderkind programmer, Shawn Fanning, under the now-notorious moniker Napster.

Some 18,000 lawsuits against file sharers have been filed by the RIAA since 2003, according to the Associated Press. At first, the association went after anonymous “John Doe” defendants, with limited success, until starting to a crackdown on Internet service providers, and now, certain university computer networks.

Gene Weimers, the vice president for information and library services at Bates, equates the file sharing problem to an arms race: As long as there is demand, a supplier will appear. The college has taken steps to block file sharing services, and hold students to strict policies of conduct, but success in blocking file sharing is fleeting.

“If people want to find a way to do it, they’ll do it,” he says.

The RIAA is right to enforce copyright laws, and colleges and universities are appropriate targets as the long-standing havens for Internet pirates. Yet meager settlements and fearsome threats can only regain the industry so much against the massive losses stemming from file sharing.

Copyright corsairs, despite the best efforts of the RIAA, are still pillaging wildly. Until the industry develops stronger safeguards against the trading of protected material, its prosecutions will remain undermined by plunder.