Federal judge postpones webcast in music downloading case

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff

The nation's first free live public webcast of a federal court hearing -- one concerning a lawsuit by the US recording industry against a Boston University graduate student accused of downloading music illegally -- has been postponed for a month.

Judge Gertner

Six days after US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner granted a motion by the student's legal team to allow the hearing scheduled for Thursday to be streamed live onto the Internet, she granted a stay by the Recording Industry Association of America, which had asked the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to block the webcast.

Gertner denied the recording association's request for a permanent stay but said in a ruling late Tuesday that postponing the hearing until Feb. 24 "will allow the First Circuit an opportunity to fully consider the petition before it.''

A spokesman for the recording association declined to comment. The group said in court papers on Friday that Gertner's ruling allowing the webcast flouted the rules of the Judicial Conference, which sets policy for the federal judiciary, and the District Court of Massachusetts. The association also contended that a webcast could be prejudicial and misleading because "the broadcast will be readily subject to editing and manipulation by any reasonable tech-savvy individual'' and that statements may be taken out context.

But Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, a founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, who is representing the graduate student at the center of the case, 25-year-old Joel Tenenbaum, welcomed the prospect of the Court of Appeals weighing in on webcasting.

"I can't imagine a stronger case for doing what [Gertner] is doing, which is opening up the federal court for this proceeding in this particular case,'' he said. "The Internet is so much a part of this case. It's the environment in which the infringement allegedly took place, it's the audience that supposed to be influenced by the statute [prohibiting unauthorized downloading], it's the generation of kids on the Internet. Instead of having a lone federal judge in the district court address the question, I'm delighted to have the [appeals] judges address it.''

On Jan. 14, Gertner said she would allow Courtroom View Network -- a New York-based company that webcasts trials primarily in the state courts -- to chronicle a key hearing in the suit against Tenenbaum, who is challenging the association's copyright infringement case against him.

Unlike most state courts throughout the country, including those in Massachusetts, the federal courts have traditionally banned cameras and recording equipment because many judges feared it would undermine the rights of citizens to a fair trial.

Since at least 1996, however, several federal trial judges in the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York, following local rules, have allowed some hearings in civil cases to be recorded and broadcast on television. And recently some judges in those courts have allowed Courtroom View Network to "narrowcast'' proceedings on the Internet, but viewers -- typically the lawyers and litigants -- can only see them by paying a subscription fee.

Gertner's ruling allowed the Courtroom View Network to stream the hearing to the website of the Berkman Center, which intended to make it available free to the public.

• Comment
• Permalink
• Email

next article in local news With new station name, Green Line now stops in West End previous article in local news Short circuit seen as cause in Fenway fire