Now, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is claiming that there's no legal basis for such a suit. Here's a quote from their amicus brief (emphasis mine):
"Defendants, like more than 20,000 other individuals, have been sued by Plaintiffs for copyright infringement based on their use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software. Although Plaintiffs’ complaint alleges infringement of both their reproduction and distribution rights, Plaintiffs’ summary judgment motion is premised solely on the distribution claims and is built around the erroneous contention that “[infringement of] the distribution right does not require a consummated transfer of the copyrighted work at issue.” Plaintiffs’ Supplemental Brief in Support of Their Motion for Summary Judgment, Doc. # 63, at 5 (hereinafter “Plfs. Supp. Br.”). This proposition, if accepted, would contravene both the plain language of the Copyright Act and applicable precedents, threatening to disrupt copyright law in a variety of contexts beyond this case."
Not being an expert on US law, I can comment on the basis of common sense (oh, how often journalists take the right to be the experts on "common sense;" this time will be no different). This "making available" idea of RIAA, which says that merely placing files in a folder accessible to "the public," has so many weak points that I don't know where to begin. What if a user has placed music files into a shared folder but is disconnected from the network? What if he has a firewall or a similar program that keeps anyone from actually accessing the files (people actually often do that, using NetLimiter)? What if - imagine that - no one ever actually downloaded the files from him, and thus the actual distribution of files had never happened?