In December, 2003, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned an earlier lower-court ruling allowing the RIAA et al. to use a provision in the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 to subpoena the names of suspected P2P file sharers from Verizon, an ISP. Read that decision here.
On Tuesday, October 12, 2004, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, letting the appellate decsision stand.