Legal News

?Billion Dollar? Charlie Nesson Makes Jury Feel Right at Foam

By Ashby Jones

We really, really hope a screenwriter or two is sitting in the audience of the music copyright-infringement case currently underway in federal court up in Boston. The cinematic possibilities are just too good.

The lead actor (Dustin Hoffman?) would unquestionably portray Charles Nesson (pictured), the eccentric Harvard Law school professor who’s representing the defendant in the case, Joel Tenenbaum. Tenenbaum, a 25 year-old Boston University grad student, has admitted to using a peer-to-peer music-sharing network, Kazaa, to swap music online, but maintains he did it only because he liked the music, not to turn a profit. Click here for the Boston Glob story; here for the National Law Journal story.

The trial began on Tuesday, and, from the sound of it, Nesson gave a pretty entertaining opening statement. According to the Boston Globe, Nesson held up a rectangular piece of plastic foam wrapped in cellophane, saying the visual represented the compact discs that record companies sold before digital music became available online. Then he cut open the wrapper with scissors. Hundreds of small pieces fell in a pile in front of the jury.

Said Nesson, during the demonstration: "You have the ability to share, and this physical object . . . suddenly broke into a million bits. Here it is. Bits. . . . Can you hold a bit in your hand? You can't. . . . And suddenly you have songs being shared by millions of kids around the world.''

If the jury finds his client committed copyright infringement, Nesson said, it should impose only minimal damages. That said, the Globe reports that Nesson appeared to be encouraging jurors to engage in a form of nullification, or to disregard a judge's instructions and rule in favor of a defendant because they disagree with the underlying law.

Timothy Reynolds, who represents four major record labels in the trial, said damages to the industry from free file-sharing are enormous and imperil "real people,'' ranging from sound engineers to talent scouts. "The defendant knew what he was doing was wrong at each step of the way, but he did it anyway,'' said Reynolds.

Tenenbaum is one of more than 18,000 recipients of letters from the Recording Industry Association of America in recent years demanding payment for illegal file-sharing, but is only the second to challenge a lawsuit in federal court. The first didn’t go too well for the defendant: Last month, a Minnesota woman, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, faced similar allegations, and a federal jury awarded record labels $80,000 per song, or a total of $1.92 million. Click here and here for LB posts on that case.

Every time we mention the escapades of “Billion Dollar” Charlie Nesson (so nicknamed for his work in the W.R. Grace contamination cases), we have to yet again urge you to watch this YouTube video, a highly entertaining promotion for one of Nesson’s courses.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 29, 2009 (boomark / email).