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Boston federal court hearing to be webcast

By Mark Obbie

Last summer, I blogged about a camera-friendly Boston federal judge, Nancy Gertner, who was considering a courtroom-camera experiment in her trial court -- dodging the federal camera ban, based on creative arguments made by Courtroom View Network and its Washington lawyer, cameras-in-the-courts veteran Jonathan Sherman. Gertner ultimately rejected the motion on procedural grounds. But it was clear that Gertner was open to the idea. And now it's even clearer. As reported today by the Boston Globe's Jonathan Saltzman, Gertner agreed to allow a webcast of a key hearing set for Jan. 22 in a prominent fight over music downloads. The record industry has abandoned its litigious pursuit of students who illegally download music, but in Gertner's court a student is fighting one of the legacy cases -- with help from Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which requested video recording of the hearing and will display the video on its site. That's a departure from Courtroom View Network's model of charging subscribers for video coverage of the courts -- and it presumably helped win the order, which is the first of its kind outside of New York's Southern and Eastern districts, where Sherman's efforts to pry open the courts were noted last October by AmLaw Daily (fifth item). Gertner noted that the subject matter of the hearing in her court appeals to "the so-called Internet Generation," just as the video will. (Of course, it's a rare college student who will appreciate gavel-to-gavel coverage of legal arguments in a copyright dispute. But we can all dream.) She also deflates the common objections to cameras and shows a public-interest spirit that's inspiring. Here's her order.As I've said before, it's disheartening that the winning arguments in cases such as these hinge on content-based compromises that are none of a court's business: how the video will or won't be edited, and whether it's a commercial product, for example. But, until the Judicial Conference reverses its 19th century thinking on cameras, guerrilla efforts by Sherman et al. will have to suffice.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on January 15, 2009 (boomark / email).