Judge Restricts RIAA's Right to Sue

But only a little bit.

Basically, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas said that placing copyrighted material in a shared drive does not constitute publication. They would have to show that illegal copying took place.

This is a good thing, as Declan McCulagh demonstates:

As I wrote last fall, there are some dangers if the RIAA's "making available" theory is widely adopted by courts. If my mother accidentally shares her computer's entire hard drive with the world by clicking the wrong button in an OS X setup menu, is that "making available?" Should she be held liable for $222,000 in damages, and lose her house, for accidentally making two CDs of music available to the world?

If I don't upgrade to a newer version of my operating system even though I know there's a security glitch that opens my hard drive to the Internet, does that mean I'm "making available" my music collection? Do Internet service providers "make available" access to Kazaa? Do search engines "make available" links to infringing files?

That being said, the Judge gave an alternate route to the RIAA, specifically that they could refile charging an "offer to distribute".

This means that people with files being shared on Bit Torrent could be liable under this, but search engines, and the examples above would not be.