This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Labels & Publishers Legal
News organisations join call for P2P case to be webcast
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 2 February 2009
It won’t just be a persistent Harvard law professor that the Recording Industry Association Of America will have to fight off in their bid to stop a potentially tricky file sharing court case from being webcast, now fourteen major news organisations have joined the battle.
As previously reported, Harvard professor Charles Nesson has proposed that an upcoming court hearing relating to the RIAA’s P2P filesharing lawsuit against Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum be webcast, and the judge presiding over the case has backed the proposals. The RIAA, though, is appealing that decision to let the case be webcast.
But fourteen news organisations have now put their name to a document calling on the court that will hear the RIAA’s appeal to allow the webcast to go ahead. Among the US news agencies and papers who are backing the proposals are the Associated Press, The New York Times and NBC Universal, the latter of which is, amusingly, part owned by Vivendi, owners of Universal Music, one of the majors the RIAA will represent in the court case.
The news agencies’ court paper says: “It is hard to imagine a hearing more deserving of public scrutiny through the same technological medium that is at the heart of this litigation”.
As previously pondered, while US copyright law in theory favours the record companies in file sharing litigation, when cases go to court the record labels’ cases against illegal file sharers can get caught up in all sorts of technicalities.
With the RIAA now moving away from suing individual file sharers, it could do without the PR trauma of one last high profile case. It’s possible Nesson, who is advising Tenenbaum on his case, hopes the RIAA will drop their lawsuit rather than have the case considered in court in front of the whole internet.
