Attempted Copyright Infringement?

Implications: A few days ago, a District Court in Minnesota reversed course on its own prior holding and decided that, in copyright law, it is not actionable to "offer to distribute" a copyrighted file without permission, but instead only actionable if you actually distribute the file.  The opinion raises a number of interesting questions about how copyright law should and does work, perhaps most notably forcing the copyright community to think through the reasons why the law ever forbids "attempted" as opposed to fully consummated misdeeds.

Analysis: In a prior ruling, a district court in Minnesota had announced that a participant in a peer-to-peer file sharing system infringes copyright when he offers a song on the system.  The legal language was that this was an actionable "offer to distribute" and that it did not matter whether the song was in fact distributed.  That same court reversed course this week and said, instead, that there must be evidence of an actual distribution in order to find liability on facts like these.

That decision raises a number of interesting issues about the Copyright Act and copyright policy; but here I want to frame one: when in the law is it appropriate to forbid "attempts" at bad deeds, thus allowing the system to stop those deeds prior to consummation and/or without evidence of consummation?

One attractive scenario would be an instance where we are confident that attempts to do a misdeed will inevitably and naturally lead to the actual misdeed.  In those instances, stopping the attempt is basically the same as stopping the misdeed, and might have the advantage of avoiding some of the harm of the deed (by allowing earlier intervention) or being cheaper to detect/prove.  Another attractive scenario would be an instance where the actual misdeed is particularly horrific (ie murder) such that society wants to stop attempts because actually waiting for the bad act itself is just too costly.

Unattractive scenarios are the reverse: ie, cases where attempts will typically not lead to the actual bad act, or where the time lag between the attempt and the actual bad act is long enough that the relevant decision-maker might plausibly change his or her mind, or where the costs of detecting the actual bad act are low and the harm caused is fully reversible through after-the-fact court remedies.

Here, the above analysis makes me suspect that an "attempt" should be actionable, though my thoughts there are tentative given the freshness of the decision.  On first blush, though, it seems implausible to think that a person who offers a file on a peer-to-peer network isn't fully intending to actually distribute the file, isn't likely to actually distribute the file, or is likely to rethink the decision and pull the file prior to consummation.  Moreover, it seems like it would be cheaper to allow copyright holders to put forward evidence of the offer than it would be to require them to actually prove the distribution.

Curious what other readers think in terms of the logic of when the law should, and should not, recognize "attempted" crimes as actionable?