There’s a legal word for intimidating people for money: Extortion.

And it’s really hard to look at the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) recent flurry of lawsuits without that word, extortion, coming to mind.

The strategy, according to an RIAA press release, is to send out letters informing students that they can either settle for a small sum or face legal action in the form of a lawsuit.

Translation: Give us your money now or something very bad will happen.

The second wave of the college piracy initiative, before Allegheny was targeted, resulted in 405 extortion letters to students at 23 large colleges and universities.

But this is only partially about stopping piracy.

Global music sales are forecasted to fall because of the legal online options of buying only one digital track instead of an entire album, the BBC reported Tuesday. Record stores are declaring bankruptcy. More bad news for the RIAA: Bloomberg News reports that Apple was celebrating the sale of its 100 millionth iPod.

It would seem as if the future is unfolding too fast for an industry that found the transitions between phonograph and CD so easy to control and profit from.

A 2004 Harvard study found that file sharing, what the RIAA calls “piracy,” didn’t hurt record sales. Keep in mind that this was before iTunes and on-line music stores became popular and the option of only buying one song became widely available.

So, despite the fact that evidence points away from college file-sharing as a cause of revenue loss, we get scapegoated because we’re an easy target for a lobbying group representing 90 percent of American record labels.

It’s so much easier to extort a few thousand dollars from a college student than it is to go blow-for-blow with Apple in the courtroom.