Legal Research

RIAA and Unwanted Publicity

By Simon Fodden

Good fun over at the latest RIAA show trial. The defendant, Joel Tenenbaum, (who has countersued), has hired Harvard law prof Charlie Nesson, whose law school team is employing a full range of social networking and IT tools to effectively embarrass the RIAA, which has since the start of the trial abandoned its policy of suing downloaders. (See my post over at Ipilogue for more on the story.) As part of this strategy, Nesson moved to obtain permission to live-stream video of the trial. The judge has today agreed to let the January 22 hearing be streamed over the internet, and has called the RIAA objection “specious.” She pointed out that the avowed purpose behind the 35,000 RIAA lawsuits was to deter would-be downloaders via publicity, and so it ill-behoved the RIAA to object to the defendant’s request for fuller publicity.

If you’re interested in catching the January 22 hearing, you should keep checking the brand new website, Joel Fights Back, and the Twitter account of the same name.

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