A federal district court judge in Arizona denied the RIAA attorneys motion for a summery judgment against two Kazaa file sharers, according to Billboard.biz. The court ruled that the two defendants, Pamela and Jeffrey Howell, did not unlawfully distribute copyrighted work by simply making it available on the Kazaa filesharing network. The court said that to qualify for infringement, the owner of the copyright must prove the "actual dissemination of copies or phonorecords."

This comes into play in this lawsuit because the music labels sued the defendants for allegedly distributing 54 music files, but the RIAA investigators only downloaded 12 of those files and the label attorneys did not provide evidence that their investigators or other Kazaa users downloaded the remaining 42 files.