Verizon this week reluctantly handed over the names of file traders at the behest of the RIAA, unmasking anonymous customers who had no idea they were the center of what will likely be a history defining industry legal battle. Late Thursday Verizon revealed the identities of customers accused of trading hundreds of files after being forced to comply by the U.S. Court of Appeals. The ruling could open the flood gate for a flurry of subpoenas from anyone looking to nail broadband customers to the wall for copyright infringement.

With this latest loss for Verizon, the job of enforcing copyright now begins to teeter and fall into the lap of network providers. In an industry begging for additional content, the entertainment and telecommunications industries are too busy fighting one another to cooperate long enough to make truly interesting content offerings a reality. That's in part because, the entertainment industry has charged, the ISP's have been making a backroom killing off of broadband file trading services and don't really want things to change.

According Sarah Deutsch, the Verizon attorney who has had a front row seat for the entire process, the company is planning to continue the battle on principle, something many wondered about when the whole thing began. "We're not going to become the Internet police for RIAA," she notes. "There's a delicate balance between copyright holders' rights and our customers' rights that needs to be preserved. RIAA crossed over the line."

As pointed out in a recent interview with Declan McCullagh, the RIAA battle has given Verizon some great press, helping the company to at least partially shake their lumbering anti-competitive image and placing them in the company of some strange bedfellows, many of whom they've come to blows with in year's past.

"It's been an interesting time to be on the same side as groups like Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We find ourselves with shared interests in making sure that fair use is preserved, that users' expectation in new digital services are fulfilled, and that copyright is ultimately a law that involves balancing the interests of many parties. We have a 300-pound gorilla on one side of the scale. Many of us are joining together on the other, to reach that necessary balance."

That was in August of 2002. Now that the smoke has cleared and Verizon has been handed a loss, it will be interesting to see if the stance taken by Deutsch is one that Verizon clings closely to. "It's probably time for Congress to step in to offer a legislative solution," Deutsch said this week after the loss.

According to a statement issued by RIAA president Cary Sherman, "The courts have repeatedly affirmed that the DMCA subpoena authority is constitutional, and does not threaten anyone's free speech or privacy rights."

Both sides concede the end confrontation will occur before the Supreme Court, which has some serious decisions to make about how the DMCA can be applied.

In the interim, it will be interesting to see what the RIAA will do with the names, and if other entertainment and software makers will begin to seriously pursue the consumer without fear of customer alientation. When asked what the organization was planning to do with the names, the RIAA informed the press this week they were "weighing their options."

With an estimated 2.6 billion files (the RIAA's numbers) illegally downloaded each month around the world, can we expect a flurry of legal bloodshed now that the flood gates have opened?