Less than a month ago, a federal district court in New York ruled on a contentious issue in the RIAA’s grim legal campaign against online file-sharing. A lot of folks have a file-sharing program like Kazaa running, and copyrighted songs sitting in their shared folder, ready to be uploaded. The RIAA’s position: That offer to swap is a crime in and of itself.

In the Elektra v. Barker case in New York, earlier this month, the court agreed.

Now comes a federal district court case in Arizona in which … a judge ruled precisely the opposite way.

Cnet’s story is here, Ars Technica’s here.  A gleeful press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is working on the case, is here. From Ars:

“The court agrees with the great weight of authority that § 106(3) is not violated unless the defendant has actually distributed an unauthorized copy of the work to a member of the public,” wrote the judge in his order. “Merely making an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work available to the public does not violate a copyright holder’s exclusive right of distribution.”

In both of these cases, and others on the same topic, the rulings aren’t final; they are merely housekeeping issues in response to motions for summary judgment and the like before the real trials begin.