The revolution will not be televised. And nor will the grand finale of the Recording Industry Association Of American's self-harming sue-the-fans litigation campaign.
The US Court Of Appeals For The First Circuit have ruled that the much previously reported Sony v Tenenbaum case should not be webcast. The judge overseeing the case said the event could be broadcast on the internet, but the RIAA appealed that ruling, and yesterday won. Technically the First Circuit ruling only applies to a specific hearing at the start of the court case, but experts say the principle will be applied to the whole case.
As previously reported, Tenenbaum was one of the students sued for illegally file sharing amid the RIAA's barrage of P2P litigation, which came to a halt at the end of last year. Although the trade association essentially admitted its campaign of lawsuits against individual file sharers had done little to curb the growth of online piracy, any legal disputes outstanding at the point of policy change will be followed through to their logical conclusion. The Tenenbaum has become the highest profile of those unresolved cases, partly because he has decided to fight the lawsuit (most settled out of court), and partly because he is being advised by Harvard law professor Charles Nesson, who has been very vocal about the whole thing.
It was Nesson who suggested the case be webcast. Presumably aware that, while US copyright law is generally on their side in individual file sharing cases, tedious technicalities often arise in court, especially over evidence, the RIAA, weren't that keen on having the whole internet tuning into the court proceedings, hence their objections to the webcast proposals. Some experts - well, me mainly - speculated that the RIAA may drop the case rather than fight it in the glare of the world, and that that might be behind Nesson's suggestion to webcast it in the first place.
Responding to the news the webcast proposals had been blocked, a spokesman for Nesson's team told reporters: "We are disappointed by the First Circuit's decision and maintain that Joel is being denied a constitutional right to a public trial in the age of the internet".