Online Broadcast of File Sharing Hearing Postponed

The first online broadcast of a federal court hearing about which we informed you two days ago and which would have happened tomorrow was postponed. U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner chose to reschedule the hearing so as to allow the claimants in the case the chance to seek appellate review of her decision granting video recording of the trial.

The plaintiff record companies were desperately prompt in filling a motion against Judge Gertner’s decision to allow webcast of the hearing in a lawsuit against Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum, accused of having downloaded seven copyrighted songs via a p2p network.

It has become pretty obvious that is not in the music industry’s intention and interest to reveal how it handles these prosecutions. The following fragment posted by citmedialaw.org is edificatory enough to the way they perceive (and fear) this possible broadcast mainly through the motifs they are throwing in:

Petitioners are concerned that, unlike a trial transcript, the broadcast of a court proceeding through the Internet will take on a life of its own in that forum. The broadcast will be readily subject to editing and manipulation by any reasonably tech-savvy individual. Even without improper modification, statements may be taken out of context, spliced together with other statements and rebroadcast as if it were an accurate transcript. Such an outcome can only do damage to Petitioner’s case. The district court has attempted to fix this problem by ordering the broadcast to be “gavel to gavel” and that there be no “editing” of the proceedings. See Order at 10. But this restriction will be virtually impossible to enforce, as non-parties will still be able to excerpt and circulate portions of the proceedings in a variety of edited forms.