Judge Deals Blow to RIAA in Music Piracy Case

The Recording Industry Association of America suffered a legal setback this week in a music piracy case where a judge ruled that the sole act of making a music file available in a "shared folder" does not violate copyright laws.

In Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA made the legal assertion that a "sound recording" that is ripped to a computer and stored in any kind of a shared folder is unauthorized. This was an interesting statement because a shared folder can be a very broad category that wasn't entirely made clear by the RIAA.

This RIAA theory on "making available" files in "shared folders" wasn't taken lightly by much of the Internet as many blogs and other sites provided misinformation that the act of ripping tracks from a CD to a shared folder was now deemed illegal. To be clear the RIAA doesn't considering ripping illegal, rather loading up MP3s in a shared folder that can be accessed by anyone using a P-to-P sharing program.

In the ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Neil V. Wake denied the RIAA's summary judgment motion and shot down all of the RIAA's theories of file distribution where the digital file did not change hands. This includes the "making available" and "offer to distribute" theories that pertains to storing songs in a shared folder.

This judgment could have significance on all of the RIAA's pertaining lawsuits. It becomes harder for the RIAA to prove that a copyrighted file actually changed hands given the anonymous nature of file-sharing programs and the lack of cooperation from Internet service providers with these lawsuits. And if it's harder for the RIAA to smite these alleged file swappers, it's harder for the RIAA to make a case against file-swappers.