Intellectual Property Law

10:30 a.m. Pacific Time: Hans Reiser was just sworn in. His attorney, William DuBois, is lobbing questions to him. The defendant says he met his wife in a café in 1998 in Russia.

From there, testimony is quickly turning to the fateful day Nina Reiser disappeared. "Directing your attention to the third of September, 2006. Did you have the occasion to see Nina Reiser on that day?" DuBois asks.

"Yes I did," Reiser answers. "She arrived at the house with my kids, the both of them and they came into my house."

"She arrived at about 2:20," Reiser adds.

"After they all got into the house, what happened then?," DuBois asks.

Reiser replies that they made a lunch of spaghetti and macaroni-and-cheese for the kids, then the Reiser's two young children went downstairs to play videogames.

A woman bailiff is sitting next to Reiser on the stand. The 44-year-old defendant is wearing the same dark coat he has worn since since the trial began on November 6. He is not wearing a tie.

Jurors are taking notes and ping-ponging their heads back and forth between Reiser and DuBois. The gallery is packed, filled mostly with reporters and trial gawkers.

Reiser is now reviewing pictures of the inside of his Oakland hills residence, the house of which the authorities say his 31-year-old wife never left alive.

10:45 a.m. Reiser says he "stayed upstairs and talked with Nina" while the kids played videogames.

DuBois: "What did you and Nina talk about?"

Reiser: "We talked about the kids and the divorce."

DuBois: "What did you talk about most?"

Reiser: "The divorce."

He says the conversation lasted about an hour.

The estranged couple also talked about their young son, now 8. He had two cavities, needed a root canal and Nina said "his front teeth were too large," Reiser says.

Reiser says his company, Namesys, made more than $1 million in 2002. He says he bought Nina a Honda minivan.

"Did you buy any other luxury items?" DuBois asks. 

"We bought a rocking chair."

11:00 a.m. Back to the day in question, Reiser says he told his estranged wife he was not going to pay her the $1,000 monthly child support he owed.

"Oh, I asked her for legal custody," he says. 

"What did she say to that?"

"She said 'no.'"

Reiser says the divorce was going "disastrously."

The meeting ended. "She says, 'Hans, I have to go.'"

Nina called the kids upstairs, to the street level. Then his wife said goodbye to the children, he says.

Reiser is now looking at pictures of the front door of the house.

"This is a photograph of the steps leading up to the street," he says of the next picture. Then the defendant denies he killed her. (Prosecutors said Nina Reiser never left the house alive.)

DuBois: "And then what happened?"

Reiser: "She walked out the door and out the steps."

DuBois: "Did you see her walk out the door?"

Reiser: "Yes I did."

DuBois: "After she walked out the door, what did she do next?"

Reiser: "The minivan starts up and drives away."

DuBois: "Did you ever see her again?" 

Reiser: "No."

11:30 a.m. After a brief recess, the jury is coming back into the Alameda County Superior Court courtroom.

"Please remain seated, Department Nine is now back in session," the bailiff says.

Hans Reiser, speaking in a faint, almost monotone voice, begins looking at and describing photos of the inside of his Oakland hills house displayed on a large monitor in front of jurors. Some of the photos show his two home computers. "That's the Windows and Linux computer. Both of them play games," he says.

Reiser says he removed the hard drives from one of the computers after Nina disappeared.

"Did you think the government was going to take the hard drives?" DuBois asks.

"Yes. They seized my kids," says Reiser. Local authorities removed his two kids, now 6 and 8, from him before his Oct. 10, 2006 arrest.

11:45 a.m. The conversation is veering to Reiser's UC Berkeley days. Returning to one of the themes of his defense, DuBois is soliciting testimony that Reiser is a serious geek, to provide an innocent explanation for some of Reiser's seemingly-odd behavior at around the time of Nina's disappearance.

Reiser enrolled at Berkeley at age 15, some 29 years ago. "I remember getting a 'D' in rhetoric," he says. "So you could not compose an essay?" DuBois asks. Reiser answers in the affirmative.

Reiser says he played Dungeons and Dragons, "Eight to Twelve hours on Sundays" from the "age of 14 to early 20s."

He dropped out of Cal four years later, in 1984, and got a $10-an-hour job as a technical writer.

"I could pay for sushi," he says.

Then he moved to work for Microsoft, earning about $500 per week teaching technical writers how to use computers. "That lasted about nine months."

"Then I went back to UC Berkeley. I didn't enroll. I just hung out."

11:55 a.m. Around 1984, Reiser says he began devoting his time to his Linux file system, which would ultimately become ReiserFS.

"What is a filesystem?" DuBois asks.

"A filesystem is a way of storing information on your computer hard drive."

From there, Reiser goes into a sometimes-rambling discourse on ReiserFS, until DuBois finally interrupts him.

"Do you still have the question in mind?" DuBois asks.

"Will you repeat the question?" the defendant answers.

Noon. Reiser adds that he wanted his filesystem to cope with virtually all information, including hypertext, to act like a Google search engine and more.

"I wanted it to do all of that within the filesystem name space," he says.

The trial is breaking for lunch. It will resume about 2 p.m.

THREAT LEVEL is providing gavel-to-gavel coverage.

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Courtroom sketches by Wired.com's Norman Quebedeau