A few more rulings like these and they'll be no more subpoenas. The Chronicle of Higher Education (registration required) reports that RIAA attempts to discover student identities at UNC Chapel Hill and NC State have been blocked:

The students said the subpoenas were invalid because they did not conform to the provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that authorizes such subpoenas and because they were unconstitutional. . . . Judge Russell A. Eliason, of the U.S. District Court in Greensboro, N.C., agreed with the students that the subpoenas violated the digital copyright act.

The decision is based on a previous decision from a U.S. Court of Appeals which ruled that

the subpoenas could be issued only to service providers that stored copyrighted material on their servers, not to providers, like Verizon, that were merely conduits of information sent by others.

The subpoenas issued to Chapel Hill and North Carolina State were the same type of documents that the appeals court had ruled were illegal. The universities' networks were used to transmit songs traded by students, but not to store the music.

Too bad these judges weren't on the US Supreme Court to rule on Eldred vs Ashcroft. Perhaps the Grokster case will see a similar, non-content industry biased ruling

Link courtesy of Wired Campus Blog