UCSD, meet the Recording Industry Association of America. The trade behemoth is suing 25 students this week as part of a national effort to discourage what it calls a “new piracy epidemic” fostered by high-speed academic networks. The lawsuits may only be shots across the bow — granted, the first such targeting UCSD students — but they represent an unfortunate and quite frightening reading of intellectual property prevailing within the entertainment industry.

What the RIAA doesn’t know is that no number of lawsuits will deter the peer-to-peer file sharing made so wonderfully viable by technology such as Internet2, the culprit in this week’s cases. Worse though, the industry has chosen to avenge the major-label profit gaps this technology has spurred at the expense of customers, technological progress and the nation’s longstanding academic tradition of creative sharing and borrowing.

UCSD was right to reject the RIAA’s request that universities filter access to the technology in question, not simply because the “i2hub” application used in these cases has many “legitimate” functions, but also because the industry has no right to regulate the nonprofit traffic of materials that hold the same intellectual potential as course reading.

That said, if the RIAA really wanted to convince University of California and California State University students of the depravity of illegal file sharing, it would throw its weight behind the two universities’ current efforts to provide students with affordable online music services. Welcoming such innovation and treating patrons as fans, critics and scholars — not simply consumers — would do much for the tarnished image and prosperity of this struggling group.