No preliminary injunction in the Jacobsen case

No, this means that offenders can go on offending until they lose the lawsuit, because they can be punished and the rightful owners can benefit just as well after the case as in the middle.

A preliminary injunction is about having the court do something before you've won your case, when you're asking the court to stop the other party from doing something during the case that can't be fixed afterwards. If you had a case where the defendant was planning to delete all the plaintiff's data, and the plaintiff went to the court saying that the defendant shouldn't be allowed to do that, if the court thought the plaintiff might win, it could rule that the defendant can't delete the data until the whole thing is settled, even though the plaintiff hasn't proved anything in detail yet, because it would be too late to save the data by the time the case is settled otherwise. Since a preliminary injunction asks that the court act on an argument that hasn't been settled, there's a requirement that what's asked for be impossible later.

The court ruled that everything Jacobsen asked for could be granted after the case is over, and so, no matter how good Jacobsen's case is, he can wait. I think, in any case about enforcing Free/Open licenses, a preliminary injunction is going to be unlikely. The usual argument for a preliminary injunction in a copyright case is that, once an end user has some content, it's impossible to get them to not have it. But we generally want the end user to have the content plus some other information, which can be fixed up later.