Ars Technica notes the year anniversary of the RIAA’s war on college students with a chat with RIAA prez Cary Sherman.

As Billboard noted in a column I mentioned last week, CD sales are down another nearly 20 percent for January from last year. The effect the RIAA’s campaign against its customers is having can only be described a truly excellent. Sherman is now in the precise position of a captain of a sinking ship directing his crew to take pot shots at the rats leaving it.

But Ars is polite.

Here’s how the numbers look after a year. The RIAA has sent out 5,404 letters in 13 “waves” to over 160 colleges and universities. Of the 5,003 settlement letters sent prior to the batch of 401 that went out last week, “more than” 2,300 of those have resulted in the targeted students settling with the RIAA. 2,465 students have been hit with lawsuits, and all of those are moving through the legal system at different rates. At $3,000 per settlement, over 2,300 settlements translates into at least $6.9 million.

There are other numbers you can generate from those figures. For instance, let’s estimate, I don’t know, $5,000 in RIAA legal fees for each of the cases it pursues. Multiply that by the roughly 2500 cases, and you have more than $10 million. Even if the group’s legal fees are half that, it’s still a wash financially, before you take into account the millions more its silly media campaign costs. And, as the continuing decline in sales indicates, it’s obvious the group’s war is having no effect.

You want to call the effort quixotic, but Don Quixote wasn’t sadistic, vengeful and grim.

The interview is mostly filled with Sherman’s spinning whatever questions Ars asks. Like this:

“Our basic survey data is that the majority of consumers don’t have a problem with the lawsuits,”   [Sherman said]. “You would never know that from reading blogs and websites, [but] when you go out to the general public, our favorables/unfavorables haven’t changed at all.”

But of course, among not the general public but music fans, one suspects the group’s unfavorables have changed. (On the other hand, it’s possible they couldn’t go any lower!) There are two interesting discussions. One is when Sherman contends that the leveling off of activity on the music networks is a result of the RIAA suits. But a rep from Big Champaign, which monitors such activity, says it’s simply a case of market saturation.

The other is when Sherman is asked why Harvard is absent from the list of schools the RIAA has targeted. Ars speculates that it’s due to the industry’s being afraid of teeing off some of the legal talent at Harvard. That seems a little thin; a lot of colleges and universities have serious law schools, right?