Remember that Washington Post article that everybody freaked out about a couple weeks ago? The one about how the RIAA was going after personal use?

We didn’t link to it here at GLONO because we knew the whole premise of the article was incorrect. In that particular case, the dude was not getting busted just because he ripped a CD, but rather because he ripped it into his Shared Folder for Kazaa. Which is a big difference. And now the Post has (finally) issued a correction.

The correction:

A Dec. 30 Style & Arts column incorrectly said that the recording industry “maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.” In a copyright-infringement lawsuit, the industry’s lawyer argued that the actions of an Arizona man, the defendant, were illegal because the songs were located in a “shared folder” on his computer for distribution on a peer-to-peer network.

Not to say that the RIAA’s argument isn’t still jacked. Simply making the files available doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody downloaded them. If nobody downloaded them, it can’t really be infringement. But the RIAA doesn’t want to have to prove that anybody actually downloaded them, so it wants the judge to rule that simply making the files available by putting them into the Shared Folder equals infringement. And that’s bullshit.

Via Techdirt.