Judicial prudence (at least where the courts have not been stacked with right-wing loons) seems to be one of the only things holding back the nutcases in many instances. Like the courts deciding that a brain-dead woman’s body should be allowed to die, especially if the preponderance of evidence says that’s what she would have wanted. Or that a boy should be returned to his father according to law, instead of being put on display by relatives as part of a major political PR game. Or that creationism dressed up as fake science should not be taught in Science classes alongside scientific theories tried and tested for over a century, as if they were somehow equal.

In this case, the courts decided that a person must actually commit a crime before they can be sued for committing a crime, as opposed to being sued for a crime simply because there was the potential for a crime to be committed. In this case, it was the RIAA claiming that they could sue someone literally out of house and home for making a few CD’s of music available over the Internet, even if there was no evidence of any sort that anyone actually stole anything. The court disagreed, saying that there had to be evidence that file sharing actually took place.

However, the judge still gave the RIAA an out: he said that if someone made “an offer to distribute, and that the offer to distribute was for the purpose of further distribution, public performance, or public display,” then a suit could be filed. I suppose that’s under the same category as arresting someone for solicitation without the crime being solicited actually taking place.

Now, what that means may be open to interpretation, but the one that seems evident is that one must prove that there was the intent to distribute copyrighted material–and that could be pretty hard to prove. The RIAA can sue based on that claim, but proving that claim might be a lot more difficult.